


radio nowhere

by all_these_ghosts



Series: then the bomb [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Colonization, F/M, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Colonization (X-Files)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2018-12-09 13:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 38,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11669958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: on a clear night, you can hear forever.





	1. later

**Author's Note:**

> this is the sequel to [then the bomb](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11648841?view_full_work=true) \-- if you don't read that first, you're gonna be real lost.

The door creaks when he opens it. He glares darkly at the offending hinges. A creaking door is a dangerous way to make an entrance, here in the new world.

Matthew Scully shoulders the door all the way open, pistol in both hands in front of him. It’s been months, he should be used to it by now, but he still feels like a kid playing cops and robbers. Or like the ghost of his dad is going to show up in full uniform to tell him he’s holding his gun wrong.

“Hello?” he ventures. Nothing.

Inside, everything is coated in dust. The books on the floor, a plate left on the kitchen table, Will’s Yankees sweatshirt slung over the back of a chair. It’s a thin layer of dust, not like in some of the houses he’s seen, so it hasn’t been so long – they were alive once, they’ve been alive After – but it covers every surface. They’re gone now.

As he crosses the kitchen, his foot sticks to the ground. Just a little. Enough to catch his attention. He glances down.

“Shit,” he says.

It’s been long enough that it’s dark brown and congealed, sticky; but if he’s learned anything these past six months, it’s what blood looks like, smells like, and feels like, in all its forms.

It’s a lot of blood.


	2. Chapter 2

**sixteen months later**

“Can you give me a hand with this?” Scully calls, and Will drags his feet as usual. Even the apocalypse can’t stop a teenager from teenagering.

Still, he’s useful when he wants to be.

And he’s all she has.

At night she scans the radio frequencies. New broadcasts pop up occasionally, though it’s been months. One station plays music: sometimes live, sometimes recorded; never her taste. Another is just two women chatting about nothing, which is the closest thing to the radio stations she remembers from before. One features an old man with a deep bass voice discussing the Book of Revelation.

One station reads a list of names. She has never listened long enough to hear it loop, and sometimes she leaves it on all night. There are a lot of names.

She doesn’t hear his name, though.

Five hundred and fifty-two days.

She lost a couple of them. The days between when she left the house and when she caught up to Will. The weight of her pistol in her hands, bloodstains on her jeans. When she got to Will she had three fewer bullets than she’d had when she left, but she couldn’t tell you how she’d spent them.

“Mom,” Will complains, behind her now. He’s holding an armload of gauze. “Where do you want this?”

Scully gestures vaguely toward the trailer that serves as their clinic. “Over the sink.” She grabs a box of syringes – unused, supposedly, but it’s hard to tell these days, when honesty is so expensive – and follows her son.

The trailer isn’t much, but with Will as her capable (if reluctant) assistant, they all get by. The compound isn’t much, either: just the fenced campus of a community college, with a couple hundred survivors living in quarters that feel closer every day. There is never quite enough of anything: food, medicine, clean water, privacy.

Still. They all get by.

Leaving Will to arrange the contents of the cabinets, Scully goes back out to grab the last few loads of supplies. In the distance the mountains are beautiful, but everyone knows that everything in the mountains will kill you. If it’s not the bears it’s the mutated dogs, or the packs of men who roam the deep forests at night. Sometimes, when it’s clear, she can see the flames of their torches darting in and out of trees.

When she’s done unloading the truck, Scully waves at the driver. Payton is tall and dark-skinned, pretty and young, maybe nineteen or twenty. Scully always wonders how she ended up with such a dangerous job.

“You should stay the night,” Scully calls when the younger woman rolls her window down.

“Can’t,” she says. “I got two more settlements to get to before it’s dark.”

Scully almost says something. Almost talks to the girl like she’s her own daughter, the way she used to remind Will about getting in cars with drunk classmates. Instead she bites her lip.

Payton’s smile is gentle, like she knows, and Scully wonders what happened to the girl’s own mother. “I’ll see you next time, Dr. Scully.” And she drives off, clanking along their ruined road.

Scully shakes her head and turns back toward the trailer. Will’s standing just outside, narrow-eyed with his arms crossed, looking out after the truck.

“She’s pretty,” Scully says lightly.

He blushes. “ _Mom_.”

“C'mon,” she says, taking the last box of supplies out of his arms. “We’ve got work to do.”


	3. Chapter 3

Night falls. His mom is off somewhere, busy as always, so Will goes out to the courtyard in the center of the main building.

It’s easy to imagine what it would’ve looked like before – students milling around between classes, maybe smoking or eating a bagged lunch. Will had exhausted his high school’s math curriculum as a freshman, so he’d signed up for Calc II at a community college. He’d only made it to one class before the world collapsed.

He wonders if he’ll ever learn it, now. On the other hand, he questions the utility of higher math after the apocalypse.

From the courtyard he can’t see the lights dancing in the mountains, or the fires that stop and start at the edge of the horizon. But there are stars, a whole universe of them.

Will isn’t learning calculus, but he is learning other things. How to heal, how to suture. The meaning of mercy here in the new world, in a world with limited medicine, no hospitals or anesthesiologists. He’s a battlefield medic from the fucking Civil War, most days.

And he is learning things that his mother can’t teach him.

With his eyes closed, Will _reaches_. He sees it in his head: the circle of his understanding growing wider, taking in everyone else in the courtyard – Sam is hungry, Caroline and Brady slept together last night and can’t look at each other today, that black-and-white cat that Araceli’s been feeding thinks it hears a squirrel.

And further. From the men who roam the otherwise-abandoned trails through the mountains, he can feel anger, fear, sickness. They’re miles away, so he can’t pinpoint specifics the way he can with the men and women – and cats – in the courtyard. But the stronger emotions travel. He hears them like a scream in the distance. Once, he could turn it off, this power of his. Now it is a constant presence, the undercurrent to everything he does. And no one knows.

Caroline crosses the courtyard and sits down next to him on the bench. “Hey, kid.” Caroline is, at most, two years older than him.

“Hey,” he says. While he’s not the youngest person in their settlement, he is the youngest of his cohort – the little group of people who’d been high school or college-aged just Before; who were old enough that they’d had expectations about what their lives would look like.

She turns her body, stretching out so her head rests on the edge of Will’s thigh, her legs sprawling down the rest of the bench. Will’s face gets hot. He tries to ignore it. Her long black hair soft and smooth against the worn-out denim of the jeans he’d inherited from one of the older guys. It occurs to him that everything will be secondhand for the rest of his life.

“Astronomy,” she says.

He doesn’t look at her. “What?”

“That’s what I was going to major in.” She’s not looking at him either, he notices. Not even sure if she’s _talking_ to him. There’s a lot of that. Everyone here is a substitute for someone else, someone who won’t come back. “I’m good at math, and I always liked this stuff.”

“What stuff?”

Her smile is audible. “Constellations. Myths. Dumb stuff: aliens and UFOs and shit.”

Will laughs out loud, and then she does crane her neck to look up at him. “Yeah?” she asks.

“That was like, my dad’s whole career,” Will says. Once he’d have found those words hard to say, hard to work past the lump in his throat. It’s easier now. Maybe this is what they mean, about time healing all wounds. “He wrote books, he ran this website. He used to go on those History Channel shows sometimes. You know, like, _Aliens Built the Washington Monument_ or whatever.”

“That’s not a real show. Who’s your dad?”

And then, suddenly, the lump is back. “Uh. Was, I guess.”

“I’m sorry.” She sounds like she means it.

He shrugs. “It’s been a while. Fox Mulder? I don’t know if you’d have—”

Caroline sits up suddenly, pulling her knees to her chest and turning to look at him. “Seriously? Your dad was Fox Mulder? I read, like, everything he ever wrote.”

“That’s the one,” he says.

“He’s – he was brilliant,” Caroline says, admiring. “You’re so lucky.”

_Lucky_ , he thinks. Another concept that’s lost all utility. What is _lucky_ now?

She continues, “He saw this coming, you know. The destruction of the human race.”

“I guess.” It didn’t matter. It didn’t save him. It didn’t save any of them.

Her eyes bore into his, muddy hazel-green in the darkness. A candle flickers in a classroom window. “It’s going to be okay, you know,” she says solemnly. “All of this is part of the plan.”

And suddenly he just wants to throw up. Without a word he walks away, leaving Caroline in the courtyard with her stars and her plans. Back to the trailer, where he sleeps some nights, when the voices are especially loud. Nights like tonight. Still her words echo in the silence, on a loop for hours.

_All of this is part of the plan_.


	4. Chapter 4

A caravan rolls in just before noon. The cadre of men and women who serve as the compound’s security force conduct their standard check – no weapons, no drugs, no explosives – and Scully’s up next, checking everyone in the group for signs of disease.

She’s only had to turn someone away once: a little girl with a rattling cough that Scully was certain meant tuberculosis. TB has wiped whole settlements off the map. Towns they used to trade information and goods with, gone in a matter of weeks. Whatever antibiotics are left have no effect on this new strand of disease. It’s not something they can risk.

The girl’s parents begged. They begged, and over and over Scully told them no, her face and voice emotionless. She’s had so many years of practice. Eventually the family left.

They’d had another child, too. A boy, maybe nine or ten years old. Like the parents, he had no symptoms. Scully offered, at the time – she offered to let the boy stay. Promised to care for him, as best she could.

That was the moment, she thinks, when they finally understood – when they finally realized that this was the end of the road. That no settlement would let them in, that indeed their only choices were to abandon their daughter or accept their own exile. And of course, that is no choice at all. Scully knows.

The woman had looked at her then. Her eyes skating past Scully’s face to focus on Will, standing a few yards away. “That’s your boy,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question. “Would you leave him?”

Of course, it is no question at all.

She wonders sometimes what happened to that family after they walked away. They risked the mountains, even though they were warned. They had nowhere else to go – they’d tried every other direction.

Today’s group comprises fifteen people on foot, pulling carts behind them. Men and women and children, all clean and well fed enough. Scully shines a flashlight into their eyes and ears and mouths. How little she knows of the visitors from these brief checks, and how much. One man’s tongue has been cut out. Scully swallows the bile in the back of her throat and asks no questions.

“Cough,” she instructs a teenage boy, about Will’s age. Her voice is muffled by the mask she wears.

She nods to Cassie, one of the guards, and the group is cleared for entry.

They filter in through the gates, and Cassie leads them through to the courtyard. A couple of them start setting up shop. All the usual traveler businesses – people selling things they’ve scavenged from the homes of the dead, food and jewelry and books. One man has gathered a collection of eyeglasses, hundreds of pairs, and he sets them out on a table for people to try on.

She’s seen these men before. Glasses are a precious commodity. She never looks too closely at their wares.

When they were young. Mulder staring at her over the rims of his glasses, feet up on his desk. Mulder sprawled across a motel bed, making furious, illegible notes on another file, glasses falling down his nose. Her hands, taking them off, setting them down somewhere they won’t get in the way.

Someone has scavenged their house by now, she’s sure of it. Which means his glasses are sitting on a table just like this, in a settlement just like this. She never wants to find them.

One woman sets up a tent and lays a blanket out in front of it. Cross-legged in a long, flowing skirt Melissa might have worn thirty years ago, she starts shuffling a deck of cards. Scully flinches.

She hates these “psychics” most of all. Worse than looters and thieves, they’re charlatans, preying on the desperation of the new era. Scully would turn them away at the gate if she had the authority.

The woman looks up and makes eye contact from across the courtyard, her hands still working the cards. Scully refuses to look away first. This is her home.

The woman’s lips turn up at the corners and she lowers her lashes, acceding to Scully’s position. But she stays there, shuffling.

Scully walks toward the bookseller’s table and rifles through the piles. It’s a better selection than she’s seen in months. She picks out a mostly empty composition notebook first, then starts going through the books. Ever since they came here she’s been looking for _Moby Dick_ , or any of the _Harry Potter_ books, for Will – he’s eighteen now, but she knows there are some things you don’t grow out of.

One spine sticks out from the others. She doesn’t have to be able to read the title to recognize it.

Mulder had gotten a whole box of them from the publisher. He gave most of them away, but copies would still appear all over the house; she’d find them under the couch, on the kitchen counter; for a while it seemed like every time she opened the hall closet, copies of his book fell out.

The woman working there follows her gaze. “I’ll cut you a deal for both,” she says, her voice gruff. “That one and the notebook.”

Scully licks her lips. Exhales. All the nights he stayed up late writing. How he’d come to bed still wired from whatever new discovery he’d made, sliding his hand across her hip and whispering the secrets of the universe into her ear. It took him four years to write it. He’d read passages out loud to her, trying to figure out if his words made sense. There are parts she still knows by heart.

“Just the notebook,” she says.

She makes her trade just as her neighbors are starting to come into the courtyard. Word of new arrivals always travels quickly. Scully watches. From hard experience she knows that the first thing you do is search the faces of all the strangers, hoping that one of them will be someone you’ve lost. In over a year, she’s never seen it happen. Even now, the world is just too big.

One by one their shoulders drop; residents and newcomers alike settle back into their accustomed hardness. There is no one here for you. There is no one you belong to.

And just a half-second later, business begins, friendly and loud, like the rest of it never happened at all.


	5. Chapter 5

When Will goes into the cafeteria, a few people from the caravan are sitting around a big Formica table. Payton’s there too, and Ian, who sometimes leaves the compound on scouting missions. Will walks up to them casually, hands in his pockets, trying to act like he belongs.

Payton turns her head and smiles at him, scooting over a little to make room. He takes a seat on the bench, his hip just brushing hers. He tries to focus.

The group continues talking without acknowledging Will at all. “Stay out of Raleigh,” one of the men from the caravan is saying. In his seventies, with military posture and sharp cheekbones, he’s clearly the group’s leader; his companions all look toward him, and Will can sense their deference. “Some crazy jackass set up his own fucking kingdom there, some kind of cult. People don’t come back, and I don’t know if they’re joining up or getting killed, but we don’t want no part in it, either way.”

There are maps of the Eastern Seaboard spread out all over the table, with different handwriting on all of them. One is marked up all the way from Boston to Atlanta, with some complicated symbology and no key. It’s more secure that way, Will supposes, though he finds it frustrating to look at.

On his map, Ian marks a big red _X_ over Raleigh. Payton’s was already marked.

“Where are you headed next?” Ian asks, idly tracing the area around their compound with his finger.

“The mountains,” the man says.

This shuts everyone up. “Come on,” Ian says finally. “You’ve got kids with you.”

He shrugs, running a hand through his cropped gray hair. “It’s an untapped market. It’s just business.”

“They’re killers.”

The man snorts. “You don’t know that. You’ve never been up there. Look, I know about Raleigh because I _went_ to Raleigh. You’re all terrified of the mountains but none of you’ve got any clue what’s really there.”

The whole table gets to arguing, but Will sits in silence. Thinking. When he’s _reached_ out toward the mountains, what has he actually felt? Fear and anger, sure, but that’s what he feels in the compound too, most of the time. Everyone’s afraid. Everyone’s angry. And it’s true that no one comes back, but there are a million possible reasons for that—

“It’s not like we can stop you,” Ian’s saying.

Payton pushes her map toward the center of the table. “This is my supply route,” she says, pointing to a highlighted line that snakes around the area. “Everything Ian’s saying is true.” She looks up at the caravan people, making eye contact with each of them in turn. “I’ve been to every town at the base of those mountains, and they all say the same thing. Nobody goes up there who comes back down.”

The man looks at Payton’s carefully annotated map, eyebrows raised in approval. “You could join us,” he offers. “It’d be safer than working on your own.”

She snorts. “Not if you’re going up there.”

“I’m just saying. We could use someone like you. Someone who knows the lay of the land down here.”

“I work better alone.” Payton smiles, baring her teeth. It could read friendly, if you’d never seen a human being smile before.

The man withdraws. “Suit yourself.”

They get back to comparing notes and maps, and when he doesn’t think anyone’s paying attention, Will runs his hand lightly over the closest map, touching his finger to a town not too far from the compound. He closes his eyes and _reaches_ , keeping the town in his mind.

Sure enough, he starts to see. Low clouds, the threat of rain. Summer heat, sweat, dogs barking. An old Victorian house with a big fence outside and five families inside. A garden, and everything in it is dead, rotted in the ground. People starving. His eyes flicker open again, and the woman across from him looks hazy-eyed, unfocused. These were her memories, then. He’s glad it was her, not Payton. He’s never tried to read her; he never wants to.

Curious, he places his palm over the mountains. He shouldn’t get anything, none of them has ever been there, but —

Brown grass, dead trees. Smoke and something toxic in the air. Nothing living anywhere – not a person or a cat or a cockroach. And a glass tower, rising up from the ground like a scene from some bad sci-fi movie —

Will shakes his head, trying to clear it. When he opens his eyes he can’t tell who the vision came from, but it can’t be real. It’s not possible. Will is suddenly conscious of how little he knows about his own powers.

The woman from the caravan speaks up. Her voice is low and resonant; it makes Will wonder what she was Before. “It’s not just business.”

The old man looks to her and they have a silent conversation that makes Will wonder if he was wrong about who’s in charge here. She continues, “You know about the crop failures.”

For the first time, Ian and Payton both look to Will. Around the other side of the old college there’s a greenhouse, part of some horticulture program. They’ve filled it with fruits and vegetables, using soil Payton collects from abandoned hardware stores. Looters took all the knives and tools and lighter fluid in the first few weeks after, but everyone assumed that you could just get soil anywhere.

And now it’s the second summer after, after the bombs and the plagues, and still everything that comes from the ground is poison. The greenhouse is their secret, the thing that will save them. Or the thing that will get them killed.

“Yeah, we know,” Will said finally.

“The situation is different everywhere. The contamination is worse on the coast and in the valleys, so it stands to reason that it might be less at elevation. And that’s the highest elevation we’ve got access to.”

Payton frowns. “It’s a huge risk.”

Narrowing her eyes, the woman snaps, “We can’t live on canned food forever. I don’t know about you, but every raid we go on, we come back with less. If we can’t find untainted ground somewhere, we’re all dead. Including you.”

* * *

 

Before it gets dark, Will follows Payton out to her truck to help her unload. There’s not much today, but she digs around for a minute in the cab. Usually there’s nothing up there except her gear, so he can’t help feeling curious.

She emerges from the cab with a basketball, and she grins broadly – a real smile, this time – and spins it on her finger for a second. “Look what I found,” she says. “You said you’re good.”

Will gapes at her. Surely this isn’t for his benefit. He’s a weird nerd, and Caroline always calls him _kid_ , but— “Yeah,” he says, “or I was, anyway.”

Payton looks at the horizon like she’s measuring the minutes until the sun sets, then tosses him the ball. He almost doesn’t catch it, he’s so flustered.

“One-on-one,” she says. “Let’s go.”

In the parking lot Will takes aim and shoots, listening to the rusty hoop clang as the ball hits the backboard. Payton’s quick and light on her feet, and he’s so busy concentrating on beating her that just for a minute, he forgets about the waning daylight, the darkness in their future, the fires still burning in the mountains.


	6. Chapter 6

_The world didn’t end.  
No. It didn’t._

She starts awake, her breathing sharp and shallow. Across the room – someone’s office, once – Will is asleep on the floor, snoring lightly. He’s been spending more and more nights out in the trailer. She wishes he wouldn’t – it’s less secure – but also, she can’t imagine what it would have been like to share a room with her mother at eighteen, so she doesn’t fight it.

For a few long minutes, Scully stares at the ceiling. She has that dream more nights than she doesn’t. _The world didn’t end_ , he’d said, his voice pleased and faintly surprised.

The end of the world came for them eventually. It still feels like she should have known.

Scully goes out into the courtyard. In the middle of the night the moon is a sliver, dead center in the sky.

The members of today’s caravan assembled their tents in a rough circle around the edges of the courtyard, and most of them are dark and quiet. But there’s still a candle flickering in the psychic’s tent.

There was a time when she saw signs everywhere; there was a time she believed in them.

Before Scully gets close, the tent flap opens and the woman peers out. “Come on in,” she says, all drawl, her voice smooth as honey.

The woman even looks like Melissa. Auburn hair in loose curls, long eyelashes.

Scully suddenly regrets everything. “I was just—”

“I know,” the woman says. “Psychic, remember?”

“I don’t believe in that.”

The woman stares at her evenly. “You did once.”

“You don’t know what I believe.”

The woman closes her eyes, and Scully has to fight the urge to turn her back and walk away. This faux-mystic shit. She can’t stand it. “I remind you of someone,” the woman says, her voice low, melodic.

Scully snorts. “Good guess. _Everyone_ reminds _everyone_ of someone.” Now that most of the referents are dead.

“Your sister,” she continues, like Scully hadn’t spoken at all. “A mistake. It was a mistake.” When her eyes open again they are bright, curious. “She died for you.”

“I’m not interested,” she says flatly, though her presence here marks her a liar. “In any of this.”

“The cards have something to tell you,” the woman says, sing-song. “If you’ll listen. Dana.”

Scully stiffens. She almost checks for a name badge on her shirt, remembering all the over-familiar patients who’d addressed her by her first name when she was practicing, but of course she’s not wearing one.

Pulling a deck of cards out from her pocket, the psychic says, “What can it hurt?”

Melissa said that to her once. Years and years ago, maybe in high school. They’d been at a carnival and Missy got her palm read. “She’s good,” she’d said, her eyes even dreamier than usual. “Come on, Dana. What can it hurt?”

Back then, Scully said no. There was no science in it, none at all. She was better than that, even at fourteen; there was nothing a palm reader could tell her that she couldn’t figure out for herself.

_What can it hurt?_ she hears again, even though the woman’s lips don’t move at all. Scully saw her father’s ghost, once. There’s something twisted about paying more heed to her sister’s ghost than she ever had to the woman herself, but Scully brushes past it and follows the psychic into her tent.

“I’m Crystal,” the woman says, and Scully has absolutely no power over the derisive snort that escapes her. Of course she’s named Crystal. The woman hands over the deck. “Shuffle,” she says, and Scully does: expertly, precisely. She has never done anything halfway. “Think of your question. You don’t have to tell me. Stop when you’re ready.”

Crystal takes the cards back and cuts the deck. She peels three cards off the top of the deck and places them on the ground between them.

One by one, the woman turns the cards over. She looks at them for a long minute, her brow knit in concentration, lips moving just slightly. Whatever she’s saying, it’s not meant for Scully.

Looking down at the cards, Scully feels the hairs on her arms rise all at once, a tingle at the base of her skull. _All of this is bullshit_ , she reminds herself.

The first card draws her attention. A man suspended from a gallows, his arms crossed. Against her better judgement she shudders.

The woman taps Scully on the knee, waiting until their eyes meet to speak. “It’s not as bad as it looks. The Hanged Man means – sacrifice. Giving of yourself to others. In this position, it’s your starting place. You’ve dedicated yourself to a higher cause, without expectation of anything in return.”

Her fingers trail along the blanket to the next card. “And here – the Page of Swords. A message, traveling swiftly. You’ll get the news you’re waiting for, soon enough.” She glances up again like she’s expecting a response, but Scully stays silent. The candle drips wax onto the third card, and the woman brushes it away.

“This last one is the Seven of Wands,” she says, her lips twisting. “There’s strife in your future, and you’ll have to stand your ground, whatever comes. It’s a defensive card – see, how he’s fending them off – but it’s a strong one.” She hesitates, running her finger along the edge of the card while she thinks. “Things are in motion. You have more control than you think you do.”

Scully licks her lips, her mouth suddenly dry. “Pull one more,” she says, and the woman’s eyes flash up to her for just a second before she complies.

Crystal turns the card over and nods, pursing her lips. “The Knight of Swords.”

For a long moment she’s silent, until Scully gives in. “Yes?”

“This card can represent a situation, but yours is a person, I think. A truth-seeker. Strong, but reckless. He’s interesting, with the Page. They could represent the same person, or two different people – a child and a champion, or the messenger and the message.” She looks down at the cards again, laid side by side, and nods. “Either way. News is coming.”

She won’t even let herself think it, so it’s not a conscious decision to say the words out loud. “Is it the news I want?”

The woman shakes her head. “That’s not something I can see. Everything is in your hands. All the cards can do is give you a warning, if you’re willing to listen. Are you?”

_No_ , she thinks. And _yes_.

Scully stands up and ducks out of the tent. She hadn’t realized how hot it was inside; the night air is so cool on her skin that it feels like rain.

“Dana.” When Scully turns around, the psychic is crouched in the doorway, looking up at the stars. She says, “Don’t give up.”


	7. Chapter 7

Matt carries that messenger bag full of evidence for months and for miles, through towns and what’s left of them. Somewhere outside of Louisville he finds his name on a list of the missing, with a note from Aunt Dana, but it’s almost a year old by the time he sees it. He wears Will’s sweatshirt tied tied around his waist; if the dogs weren’t all glassy-eyed and oozing black from their ears, he’d find a bloodhound and track his family’s scent.

He spends his birthday freezing his ass off in an empty barn, just after the new year. He drinks a tiny airplane bottle of vodka for the warmth. He’d found it in an abandoned car months before. It’s not exactly how he’d envisioned spending his twenty-first, but he’s not dead, and that’s something.

At night he sets up in abandoned houses, even when there’s a town nearby. The disease that killed so many people is gone now, or at least dormant, but there are all kinds of new terrors in the world. It’s easier to be by himself. And he doesn’t have to share the food he finds, either.

The cold weather sends him south; his aunt’s note back in Louisville sends him east. Spring takes him through Tennessee, and he goes three weeks without seeing another human being – dead or alive.

When he finally sees the sign that says _Welcome to North Carolina_ , it’s rusted and torn halfway out of the ground.

The sun stays up late now and so does he, going through the contents of his bag night after night. Looking for clues, for anything he might have missed in that dusty stack of photographs, maps, notes; a piece of paper with a list of names, one of them his grandmother’s. He has memorized all of their names.

Matt wonders, not for the first time or the thousandth, what happened to his parents, or to Rebecca. On the last day of the old world, she sent him a Snapchat of her homecoming dress; he’d said _hideous_ – as a joke, obviously – and then he got a barrage of texts from his mom about how he needed to be nicer to his sister.

At night he spends a lot of time thinking about all of those lasts. The last time he saw his best friend, the last thing he said to his parents, the last joint he smoked, the last time he surfed at the beach, the last time he went to a grocery store and paid for food with money.

Two years ago he flew from San Diego to Washington National. The flight was something like five hours long; he had a middle seat and he remembers how restless he felt, his body almost itching with it. Five hours to travel across the entire country.

Matt understands that the distance is impossible now, that the three thousand miles that separate him from his family are actually, literally _impossible_ to traverse; in almost two years of walking, he has never met anyone who’s gone west of the Mississippi since Before. In all likelihood, he’ll never really know what happened to them.

But of course he knows.

If he’s going to find anyone, it’s Will and his aunt and uncle. They survived, they were _here._ He has notes in their handwriting, a map – one that he made, in what feels like some other lifetime – that shows the distance they traveled trying to find him.

So when he stops at a gas station off of what used to be the interstate and sees his name on another list of the missing, it feels inevitable. This one isn’t in Aunt Dana’s handwriting, but it’s definitely his name and birthday, and it’s dated to just a couple months ago. The woman sitting on a folding chair in the parking lot has a note for him, too.

A note in her handwriting. With coordinates.

He’s back on the trail.


	8. Chapter 8

For the most part they’ve kept sickness from the compound, but sometimes it sneaks in anyway: botulism, from one of the dozens of cans of food they consume every day. Will and his mom spend the better part of two days taking shifts watching the victims. They go through a _lot_ of bleach.

When it looks like both men are in the clear, Will wrinkles his nose and passes off the last shift to his mom. “You need to train another assistant,” he says.

She doesn’t look at him as she tugs on her gloves. “Are you going to quit?”

He rolls his eyes. Like that’s even an option. “No. But there’s almost two hundred people here. We’re not enough. This – this could’ve been _so much_ worse. We’re lucky it was just those two. What if there’d been ten people, or twenty?”

She purses her lips, considering.

Will says, “I could help you train them. You won’t have to do it all yourself.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about.” She pauses, and Will can fit all kinds of terrible things into that gap, so he’s relieved when she continues. “Your dad, when he was – sick. You were able to move the infection along.” Her gaze is sharp. “Is that a reasonably accurate description?”

That feels like a lifetime ago. “Yeah,” he says, “it is.”

“Have you tried it since then? Or this time?”

Will stares at her. “With the food poisoning guys? Uh, no. I don’t think…it only worked that time because we gave him some of my blood. I could control it.” He tries to remember how it felt, how he can explain it. Hesitantly he adds, “Or maybe it worked because of the source of the infection. Like, if the disease was from the same place that…”

His mom finishes softly. “That you are?”

“Yeah.” He swallows. “I guess.”

She doesn’t correct him like she usually does. Her eyes are far away. “Will, if I can find another assistant, I’d like you to spend some time on a project I’ve been working on.”

Of course his mom has a secret project. What else would she do with the spare five minutes she has every day?

“I’d like you to try what you did with your father, but with some other organic material I’ve been collecting. Do you remember, right after, the ash over everything?” When he nods she continues, “Whatever that was, I think – I think it deposited some kind of pathogen in the soil, and that’s what’s killing the plants and making the animals sick.”

“They’re starving us out.”

“Yes, I think so.”

He snorts. “Wouldn’t it have been faster just to bomb everybody?”

“I assume the pathogen is making the land habitable for them at the same time as it’s destroying things we need. I’m hoping this means it won’t hurt you, either.” Her eyes turn down at the corners, apologetic; she looks down at her clasped hands. “Will. I don’t want to put all of this on you. I know it’s not fair—”

“But you think I can help. The way I helped—”

“Yes.” She bites her lip. “Maybe.”

When Will was younger, he never thought he would have to bleed to save the world. He would never have believed that he had that kind of power, or that kind of responsibility. He’s about to concede when someone knocks on the door, then opens it. Will braces himself for more botulism victims. More vomit.

Instead, Cassie pokes her head into the trailer, and she looks just fine. “Hey, Dr. Scully? There’s a new guy at the gate.”

With just the briefest hesitation, his mom gets up and starts gathering all of her processing equipment: gloves, mask. Will passes her a medical kit.

Cassie clarifies, “I mean, he’s, like, asking for you. I think he knows you.”

From across the room Will makes eye contact. Who would be asking for her, other than—

“You should still bring your stuff,” Cassie says. “See you in a minute?” She lets herself out, and Will and his mom stare at each other. After a minute she says, “Will, do you—can you tell?”

Maybe, but he won’t say it out loud. The truth: he believes in the powers of his mind more and more, but they are nothing precise, nothing perfect, and he can’t bear the thought of being wrong.

“Let’s go see,” he says.

Will leads her out, Cassie a few steps ahead of them. There’s a cluster of people standing at the entrance to the compound, and Will can’t see around them.

Until they part like the fucking Red Sea, leaving a clear line of sight to the middle of the group, where his idiot cousin, his best friend, is standing with his arms crossed. Looking skinny and kind of beat to shit, but _actually there_ , and his heart probably stops for a second because it just seems so impossible.

With a pang he realizes that he’s barely thought about Matt for months. He’d just assumed Matt was dead and then tried to move on, but Matt’s here, which must mean that he’s been looking for them this whole time.

When Matt finally notices Will and his mom, he just raises his hand up in the air. The world’s least enthusiastic wave.

His coolness is betrayed when they finally reach the gate. Will’s mom gets there first and doesn’t even put her mask on before she hugs her nephew. “It’s so good to see you,” she says into his shoulder; she releases him with a pat on the shoulder and a teary smile.

Will chokes out, “Jesus, dude,” and Matt wraps him in probably the least manly hug of Will’s entire adolescence, and he just does not give a shit at all.

“Lighten up, dumbass,” Matt says when they break apart. “It’s just the end of the world.”

Will shakes his head. “You look like a fucking mountain man.”

“Sucks I had to wait till the apocalypse to grow a beard,” Matt agrees. “It’s a good look for me.”

Turning back to the guards, Will’s mom starts making introductions. They’re all staring openly, and Will wonders how long it’ll be before everyone in the compound knows. When’s the last time anyone saw a reunion?

“Doesn’t matter who he is, we still have to check him,” Cassie says gruffly, and Matt hands over his bag and holds his arms out obligingly. Will watches as they pat him down.

“Gun,” a man announces, pulling it out of the bag. “Gotta leave this with us, son.”

Matt sighs, but he doesn’t argue. Will’s bouncing on the balls of his feet, ready to show Matt everything they’ve built out here in the middle of nowhere, ready to hear every story Matt’s willing to tell him about what happened and how he finally got here.

When Matt’s released he immediately starts telling Will about a bear he saw and some girl he met and how he found a skateboard in some guy’s garage and rode it for a month, and Will shows him the way inside, remembering – just for a minute – what normal feels like. What happy feels like.

He doesn’t notice his mom staying behind at the gate. Looking after them, quiet.


	9. Chapter 9

Late that night, after Matt passes out on a couch in what used to be a student lounge, Will is reading a physics textbook he stole from the library and halfheartedly working on problem sets. Scully wishes he’d go to bed, but she’s not going to tell him more than once, and in any case, she understands. It seems vanishingly unlikely that she’ll be able to get any sleep tonight.

This whole time she’d assumed Matt was dead, but here he is.

She listens to Will’s pen scratching across paper. Candles flicker in the dark.

Payton had looked at Scully strangely when, early on, she’d asked for reams of paper, pens and pencils, but it’s all been better for morale than just about anything other than antibiotics. And office supplies are a hell of a lot easier to come by.

Her own pen in hand, Scully adjusts the tuner of the radio, slow. Her nightly ritual, unimpeded even by the new arrival.

She keeps a list of the known stations next to the radio, making notes whenever anything changes: a new host, different music, even a different book of the Bible under discussion. There are stations that they only receive occasionally or on especially clear nights, others that disappear for months and then come back, some that interfere with each other so you can barely make out either one. Scully tracks all of it.

“There hasn’t been anything new for weeks,” Will says, exhaustion giving his voice an edge. "I don’t know why you bother—”

Scully shushes him urgently. Between two reliable stations, there’s something unexpected. The static is choppy, uneven, like the signal is trying to reach and can’t quite make it. She gets up and carries the radio over to the window.

A voice filters through, unintelligible.

“Mom?”

“Something new,” she says in answer to his unspoken question. “I’m going up to the roof.”

They’re not technically allowed on the roof at night. None of them are. It’s too vulnerable, too obvious, their silhouettes up against the stars. Without light pollution the sky is achingly bright at all hours, but it’s a new moon, and it’s worth the risk. At night they can hear broadcasts from all over; there won’t be an opportunity during the day.

After a dramatic sigh, Will follows her out of their room, up the emergency staircase, onto the roof.

A voice crackles. “—this is radio—”

Scully’s brow furrows. She stands at the edge of the rooftop, holding the radio up overhead like a signal flare.

“—alive—”

Will comes to stand next to her, frowning off into space. The mountains and valleys laid before them and the stars overhead. The signals beaming, radio waves traversing distances that are nearly impossible on foot. Some nights she gets a broadcast from Ottawa.

“—if you’re lis—”

The broadcast cuts out abuptly, the jumpy, intermittent static fading back into the dull whine of dead air.

Scully cranks the handle again, but it doesn’t change. The signal’s gone.

For a while she listens to nothing. In the distance something howls.

Will says, “Matt’s alive,” and in eighteen years she’s never heard that kind of awe in her son’s voice.

“I can’t believe it either,” she admits. News is coming, the woman had told her, but she never said what that message would be. “He came a very long way to get here.”

“He’s…different,” Will says, testing out the word. He looks at her. In darkness like this, he looks so much like his father that it’s almost hard for her to see him. “He’s trying to act the same, but underneath he’s changed. I can feel it.”

“So have you,” she says gently. Mostly for the better, despite everything. Her son has grown up brave and kind, and what more can anyone ask for?

She sets the radio down and its silence fills up the air. She puts her arms around Will, and he closes his eyes and leans against her. After they go downstairs Scully stays up, listening to the empty station, imagining voices in the static.


	10. Chapter 10

He taps the mic, then winces at the feedback. Frohike gives him an apologetic shrug. “Try again,” he mouths.

Mulder sighs. “Is this thing on?” he says in a dead monotone.

“Better than that,” Frohike says.

“Fine. ‘This is Radio Nowhere–’”

“I fucking hate that song–”

“Is there anybody alive out there?” Mulder says. He doesn’t need to turn his head. He can practically hear Frohike’s eyeroll.

Behind them the door bursts open. “It worked,” Patrick says, grinning. “It worked!” The buzz of static on Patrick’s hand-crank radio, and when Mulder speaks into the mic again he hears his voice cutting through the static, just a bare second after the words leave his mouth.

“Pretty good,” Frohike says.

“What’s the range?” asks Mulder.

Patrick raises his eyebrows – an expression that lacks efficacy when his face is mostly covered by a stringy mop of dark hair. “Fuck if I know,” he says, then nods toward the door, through to the room where he’d been sitting. “At least fifteen feet, evidently.”

Patrick and Frohike start getting technical, some noise about skywave propagation, frequencies and hertzes. Before long, Mulder’s interest wanes and he wanders out into the hall.

 _Is there anybody alive out there_ , he thinks.

He stops to stare out the window. Plate glass, thick and bulletproof and probably other-stuff-proof too. Toxic rain-proof, at least, since that’s what’s been falling for two straight weeks and the glass is still intact. You can’t say as much for half the stuff in the perimeter. Mulder’s been watching the slow disintegration of things all week: a stack of old truck tires; a dead tree; even, impressively, a saw someone had left lying out in the yard.

In five years, or ten, or fifty – what will be left? What evidence will there be, what will attest to the history of human civilization? He’s seen sketches and even a few photographs from the cities. One photograph, taken just a few blocks from Scully’s old apartment in Georgetown, sticks in his mind. The buildings look bombed out, carved hollow; you can see into the apartment blocks and shops like dollhouses. On the cobblestone streets plants grow up out of the mortar. That white ash, covering everything.

In the middle of the street, a dog sits on its haunches, ears perked. It’s looking straight at the camera, eyes wide open. Glowing.

He’d walked Scully home along that same street, hands in his pockets. Back when she was going through treatment, they’d gone to a Chinese place near her apartment. She ate half an egg roll and some soup before she wanted to go home.

After she went inside he’d stood out on the sidewalk, watching her lights turn on and then, just a few minutes later, off again. He had prowled the streets near her house for hours, deep into the night. Thinking of Scully, and everything he stood to lose.

When he first lost his arm he still felt it constantly, a dull ache. Since he lost Scully – since she left – _since she did what you told her_ , he reminds himself – he’s hardly noticed the arm at all. What’s a phantom limb to Scully’s ghost following him everywhere?

He believes she’s out there. He believes that she found Will, that they are surviving. On good days, he lets himself believe that he’ll find them.

Outside the rain starts to fall. It sluices down the glass exterior, too strange a color, the consistency all wrong. Gelatinous and just slightly orange, almost glowing in the oppressive dark. He has not been outside in sixteen days.

He’s going to lose his mind, cooped up in here. Whatever’s left to lose.


	11. Chapter 11

“Are you going to dinner?” Will calls from the doorway to the trailer. Matt’s right behind him, rubbing his eyes on the hem of his shirt. He’s been sleeping since he arrived two days ago, more or less. At some point she’ll have to ask him what he saw out there.

“Not tonight,” Scully says. “And neither are you.”

Both boys cock their heads in identical, questioning gestures; in that moment, they’re nearly twins. Scully never really understood Bill, and God knows he never understood her, but she is grateful for him, for this, for the fact that her son grew up with a brother.

"Don’t tell,” she warns, only half-joking. She holds out a pot full of bright orange noodles: possibly the last box of Kraft macaroni and cheese any of them will ever eat. Three years ago she would have given a speech about its total lack of nutritional value, plus the fact that it doesn’t actually taste very good, and Will would have groaned and rolled his eyes. Now it’s a delicacy, and both boys gape at her.

“Where did you _get _that?“__

Scully shrugs in response. In fact she’d found it months ago, the last time she left the compound on a scouting mission, before they decided a doctor was too valuable a person to risk. She should have turned it over at the time, but instead she stuffed it in her bag, underneath her extra clothes. Some small rebellion.

They sit down on the floor to eat it out of the pot, something else she never would have allowed before. Matt closes his eyes. “I think this is the first hot food I’ve eaten in like, a thousand years.”

Will says, “You could’ve had some yesterday if you’d gotten your ass out of bed.”

“I think you mean out of _floor_. Because that is where I was sleeping.”

They bicker for a few more minutes. The background noise is almost a relief.

All day she’s been distracted, thinking about the radio station she heard the night before. Sitting in a meeting, taking soil samples from the yard, stitching up a gash on some kid — he wouldn’t tell her how he got it. The entire time she could hear the static echoing, that voice reaching out over the skywaves.

If she is honest with herself, it’s why she keeps such careful track of the radio stations. It keeps her awake at night: the idea that people are broadcasting, but no one is listening; men and women alone, sending their voices off into the silence.

After they eat Will cleans up the evidence, then goes off somewhere with Matt in tow. Scully waits for the sun to set, then cranks the radio until it comes back to life.

Her fingers are itching to go right back to the new station, but Scully needs order and discipline as much now as she ever has. She starts from the beginning. Only after she’s gone through every station does she let the dial settle where she heard the voice last night. And there’s nothing there.

 _What happened to you,_ she thinks.

Listening to the hum, she starts writing again, furiously, not notes this time but memories. This, too, is just speaking into the silence. It’s better than not speaking at all.

* * *

 

Hours later, she comes awake suddenly. There’s a voice coming through again, clearer than last night. Scully double-checks to make sure she’s still tuned to the right station.

“Testing,” it says, “two—three—”, and the voice is so familiar.

Her heart thundering. _You’re just hearing things_ , she tells herself, _you’re desperate and—_

It says, “Hey, Starbuck, if you’re listening.”

“Oh my God,” she says. The sound cuts out again. “No, come on—”

“—turns out I was right about that peg leg thing—”

She presses a hand to her mouth. Closes her eyes. Maybe she’s still dreaming.

“—all right here. Patrick, is this working? I—”

The station recedes into static. She sits next to the radio, barely breathing, until she’s sure it isn’t coming back.

If she’s the only one who heard it, did it really happen?

Scully goes out into the courtyard and even though it’s the middle of the night, that psychic still has a candle lit, and her shadow is moving around inside. Maybe she never sleeps.

Scully yanks open the curtain. “What was the message?” she demands.

Crystal looks up at her, unperturbed. “I’m sorry?”

“The other night. You told me there would be a message.”

Her face is placid. “I didn’t say the cards had answers, Dana. Just that they had something to say.”

“Then pull another card.” God, if Melissa could see her now.

She shrugs. “It’ll cost you. I’m a businesswoman.”

“And you’re in my town,” Scully snaps. It’s been a long time since she threatened anyone. It feels good.

With a deep sigh, the woman shuffles the deck. After a moment she sets it down and pulls one card off the top.

 _The Star_ , it says on the bottom.

The psychic’s face clears. She holds the card out to Scully, who takes it.

“There’s hope,” Crystal says, quiet. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”


	12. Chapter 12

Mulder’s sitting alone in the control room, feet propped up on the table, idly turning the dial on the radio. Mostly static. A few stations pop in and out and he listens to each of them for a minute or two. The lists of names. A weather report from somewhere – the guy never says where. The nutso Bible guy, because it turns out the apocalypse is full of those.

 _Is anybody alive out there_ , he thinks again, for the millionth time. He doesn’t give a fuck about Springsteen either, but he can’t get it out of his head. Earlier, when he was testing in here with Patrick, looking for something to say, he’d defaulted to talking to Scully. After a year and a half without her, she’s still his default.

And who else would he talk to? The base is mostly men, government guys and contractors, some military. And a few tech geniuses, mavericks from the old world, which is most of the people Mulder sees — all the guys that Frohike is buddies with now. They make him feel distinctly un-genius-like, which is probably good for him.

Skinner’s approach, on two crutches and one foot, is unmistakable. Mulder can feel him hovering in the doorway like a gnat. Maybe if he doesn’t turn around, Skinner will leave.

Instead he says, “Do you think she’s listening?”

Mulder flinches.

Skinner sits down heavily next to him, and in that moment Mulder can see everything that’s weighing them both down. Nobody here has an easy load to carry. He says, “I do.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

Skinner just keeps talking anyway. “I have to believe she’s alive.”

“You _want_ to believe,” Mulder says darkly.

“What’s the difference? Anyway. With her talents, she’d be in demand anywhere. Hell, she’s probably in charge of some town. Probably a nicer place than this shithole.”

He keeps talking, but Mulder lets it fade out. Instead he imagines hearing Scully’s voice on the radio, wonders who she would pretend to talk to, out in the void. He remembers reading her journal when she was in the hospital all those years ago. He was so used to her case reports, dry and factual; reading her journal made him _yearn_ for her. For this woman that he didn’t understand half as well as he’d thought.

She’d written it for him.

Her handwriting, neater than his, careful. _I need to know that you’re out there if I am to ever see through this._

Yeah. He’s been thinking about that a lot lately.

“…six months or so,” Skinner’s saying, and Mulder is pulled back in it.

“What?”

Skinner glares at him. “The scientists came back from the field yesterday. They think that’s all we have left.”

“Before what?”

He shrugs. “Before the world is irreversibly transformed. Before we can’t live here anymore.”

“I thought it stalled. I thought—”

“We were wrong.”

Skinner gives that a minute to let it sink in.

"It’s the end of history,” says Skinner, finally. “I didn’t think I’d live to see it.”

“Maybe you won’t.” Mulder yawns and stretches his arms out wide, playing at disaffected. “It’s longer than I expected. Besides, we had a pretty good run.”

Skinner shakes his head, disgusted. “Fuck off.”

Mulder turns on him. “What do you want me to say? We’re gonna spend the last months of our lives cooped up in some secret government facility, watching the world fall apart.”

“And you don’t care.”

He doesn’t care, not really.

Skinner stands up and glares at him from on high. “Get up. You need to see something.”

Grudgingly Mulder follows him down the stairs to one of the sub-basements: their medical ward, which Mulder realizes is likely the best hospital in the country at this point, thanks to their stockpiles of medication. It’s slow going; a world without elevators isn’t an easy one for Skinner anymore. He makes his way carefully, leaning on the railing while Mulder holds his crutches.

Finally Skinner stops outside a quarantine room and stares through the window. A split second after Mulder joins him, he draws sharply away, looking off down the corridor. Skinner is unmoved.

“Look familiar?” Skinner asks.

Mulder nods instead of speaking. His mouth has gone dry.

His old boss’s voice is dispassionate, almost cold, but Mulder knows him better than that. “They came back a week ago,” he says. “Nothing we’ve done can stop the infection.”

“But we haven’t seen this since—”

Skinner ignores him and continues. “They went into a town that died in the days after the bombs. It was barricaded off; they thought someone was protecting something valuable: food, medicine.”

Mulder stares at the men. “It was a warning,” he says, and Skinner nods.

They are silent for a long time. On two standard-issue hospital beds the men writhe in silence. Both of them have had limbs amputated; something black pools on the tile floor beneath them. No one tends to them.

“William cured you,” Skinner says, finally, and Mulder swallows and doesn’t speak. “We need to find him.”

Mulder shakes his head. “I don’t know where—” He doesn’t even know _if_.

“You have a better shot of figuring it out than anyone else here.”

Back when they were at the lake house, that long winter, Skinner had said the same thing about Will: that he was _necessary_. That he was a cure. It disquieted Mulder then as now.

His son. All Skinner sees is his blood and the power in it. He imagines Will here in this sub-basement, getting poked and prodded by men in white coats with masks over their mouths. His son, bleeding for everyone else. It’s nothing Mulder ever wanted for him.

“I wasn’t conscious,” Mulder says, looking for excuses. “You can’t be sure that it was Will.”

Skinner pulls something from his pocket then: an empty vial, labeled in Scully’s familiar handwriting. “I can,” he says quietly. “Before I left, Scully gave me this. For testing.”

Mulder doesn’t have to ask. Of course Scully would’ve acted in the name of science. “And?”

He gestures toward his leg, which he’d lost from just below the knee. Until just now, Mulder had never questioned how he survived.

“His blood is the only thing I’ve seen that has any impact on the alien pathogens. Your son saved you. He saved me,” Skinner says. “He could save the world.”

And Mulder thinks: _maybe_ , but he knows something about saving the world, and the things you sacrifice to get there.

Skinner says, “Find him.”


	13. Chapter 13

It takes Will more than a week to get around to doing what his mom asked him. His days are surprisingly full: showing Matt around and keeping his secrets, helping out in the clinic, trying to flirt with Payton whenever she comes by. So his mom’s soil project falls by the wayside, despite her reproachful eyes.

Will’s been trying not to think about his powers, about what they might mean. He still feels a pull behind his sternum some nights when the sky is clear.

When he woke up this morning, though, he’d found a container of soil from outside right next to his head. On a torn-out piece of notebook paper, his mom had written: _Today._ She’d underlined it three times.

And so.

It’s even more humid and sticky in the greenhouse than it is outside, which is saying something, and Will’s been trying to get the soil in the container to do something — anything — for hours now, but it’s not like before, it’s not something he can control. When he hears the door open and shut he looks up immediately, desperate for any distraction.

Payton’s standing there, being the best kind of distraction. “Hey,” she says. “Your cousin said you were probably in here.”

He feels a sudden and totally irrational stab of jealousy, but plays it cool. “Yeah, I’m just working on some stuff.”

Her eyes take everything in: things growing, the sun through the glass, trowels and garden gloves strewn everywhere. “This is cool,” she says, running her hand along a stainless steel shelf, touching the leaf of a tomato plant gingerly, like she might hurt it. “What you do here.”

“Come on. You’re the one driving around doing dangerous stuff all the time.”

Crouching down to look more closely at the plant, she says to the tomatoes, still tiny on the vine: “Everything we do is dangerous.”

Will watches her, finding it hard to swallow. Her long, slim fingers, the easy way she moves. He thinks about Louisa, the girl he’d taken to Homecoming and kissed exactly twice; he thinks about how she’s dead now, but he can’t picture it. He just sees her in that dark blue dress, spinning to show her friends the way the fabric swirls around her.

Finally Payton straightens and turns to him. “Look, I came here to — I don’t know. To say goodbye, I guess. That caravan is leaving tomorrow, going up into the mountains. And I’m gonna go with them.” She fidgets with a ring on her right hand, spinning it around. “So I’m passing the route off. I won’t be back here.”

He nods, slow. “I figured.”

“You figure a lot of things.” Her eyes narrow, but there’s nothing critical in her gaze. She’s careful, searching. “You’re not going to try to convince me not to go?”

Will shrugs. “Could I?”

“No.”

“Then there you go.” That vision he’d gotten of the mountains — the tower, the toxic rain — flashes behind his eyelids, but he pushes it aside. He doesn’t even know if it’s real. “What changed your mind?”

Payton perches on the edge of the counter. With the sunset streaming in he notices, for the first time, the freckles scattered across her nose, the flecks in her dark eyes. “I was talking to Caroline,” she says. “She says your dad is — was — some famous alien hunter or something.”

“Or something,” Will agrees.

“Caroline says that it’s aliens who did all of this.”

“Caroline says a lot of shit.”

“Yeah.” She looks at him closely. “Is she right, though?”

Will’s tongue darts out to wet his lips. A nervous habit he picked up from his mom, probably, a long time ago. All he can eke out is, “Maybe.”

Her smile is small, and not at all pleasant. “Then this is war,” she says. “And I want the high ground.” She pauses. “You could come, too.”

“I can’t.” It’s not that he’s a coward and it’s not that he isn’t curious: but look what happened the last time he ran away. Payton’s gaze is clear, curious. Will explains, “It’s my fault my dad died.” It’s the first time he’s said it out loud in all this time. It hurts to say. “I left home to try to protect him and my mom, and instead it got him killed, and I can’t. I can’t do that to her. I can’t leave.”

Payton stares down at her hands, her fingers twining together. After a long moment, she glances up at him again. She asks, “Do you know how my parents died?”

He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to, either.

Her voice is soft. “It happened right in front of me, Will. I couldn’t do anything about it, and I see it happen over and over again every time I fall asleep.” He can see her swallow. “You can only protect yourself.”

“I don’t believe that,” Will says, and his voice is stronger than it has any right to be.

She hops off the counter and stands on her tiptoes to kiss him, so quickly it’s over before he knows it’s happening. “I figured,” she says, her lips almost brushing his cheek.

And she slips out the door. And she’s gone.

* * *

At some ungodly hour his mom shakes him awake, and in the darkness he can just make out the shape of the radio in her hands.

“Listen,” she hisses, settling herself cross-legged beside him.

Will obliges. For a few minutes there’s nothing, and then he hears it.

“This is Radio Nowhere.” Static, static. A few different voices talking over each other, sounding like they’re underwater. Then the same voice again: “…on a clear night you can hear forever.”

 _God._ He knows that voice. Months ago he’d worried out that he might be forgetting his father’s face, the sound of his voice; he was wrong. He’d know it anywhere. He sits up.

“Mom.”

He doesn’t have to say anything else. She nods. For the first time he notices how gently she’s holding the radio, like it’s a precious thing.

If his dad is alive. If this isn’t some kind of trick or a mistake.

If it wasn’t all Will’s fault, after all. If he is absolved.

Will says, “What are you going to do?”, and his mom is silent.

In eighteen years, he has never thought, even for a second, about the possibility of his parents choosing each other over him. Of course he knew that they were different from most of his friends’ parents, whose relationships tended toward the businesslike. He knew they shared a past — and a present — that would always be outside his ken. But he also knew that he was always first. That his parents made sacrifices for him, sacrifices he would never be expected to repay.

He is very, very quiet. Again: “Mom.”

She looks at him, eyes shining.

“Are you going to leave me here?”

She licks her lips and glances briefly away, the way she always does when she’s nervous. It’s her tell. He should know; he shares it.

“No.” The vehemence in his voice surprises him. “We have to stay together.”

“I’m not going far,” she says, infuriatingly calm. “Just until I find a town that can broadcast out. That’s all I need. I just need to send a message.”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

She touches his cheek like she did when he was a little boy, and it stings like a slap. “I need you here, Will,” she says. Before he can raise an objection, she counters it. “You’re not a kid anymore, Will. We both have responsibilities, and this is yours. Stay here. Work in the greenhouse. Keep an eye on Matt. Treat the people you can treat. I’ll be back in a few days.”

He can’t help it. “This isn’t fair,” he says, feeling petulant and thirteen again.

His mom sighs. “Nobody said it was.”


	14. Chapter 14

She meets with Joanne and Caleb before sunrise. They’re just starting to organize their people, gathering up tents and supplies for the journey ahead, but they still step aside with her when she approaches.

“I’m not going far,” Scully says. “I need to find a town with a radio transmitter.”

They exchange looks. “Shouldn’t be too hard,” Caleb says finally. “Your people know you’re going?”

Scully didn’t ask permission. She’s not even sure who she _would_ ask; there’s no clear hierarchy, and as the only doctor she’s inclined to think she’s the equal of anyone else here.

More importantly, she strongly suspects that if she did ask, they’d say no. It’s been months since she was “strongly discouraged” from going out on supply missions; since then, people have been visibly on edge whenever she so much as sets foot outside the gate. The guards — who are supposed to keep people out — do a good job keeping an eye on Scully, too.

That feeling, somewhere at the back of her neck, that people are watching everything she does: it’s so familiar, it’s almost reassuring.

So all she says is, “I’m coming back.”

“That’s not what I asked you.” He’s looking down at her with his arms crossed. Caleb has a military air, stern and serious, but Scully’s well accustomed to saying _no_ to men like him.

“And I didn’t ask _you_ for an opinion. If you won’t take me, then I’ll find another group to travel with. My skills are valuable.” This is mostly a bluff. Groups don’t come through here all that often; she could be waiting for weeks. She’d probably end up going alone, which is a far more dangerous prospect.

Caleb looks unmoved, so she takes the nuclear option. “That girl with you,” Scully says.

“Lotsa girls with us.”

Scully narrows her eyes. “The pregnant one.”

Caleb and Joanne exchange a glance.

The girl in question looks about eighteen, Will’s age; blonde and slender except for the baby, with a fearful look in her eyes. A doe facing down a rifle. Scully says, “That’s her first baby.”

Quick, like she doesn’t mean to say it out loud, Joanne says: “She’s my daughter.”

Scully nods, purses her lips. “She’s what, thirty-nine, forty weeks? It could be any day now. What are the chances you _happen_ to be passing through a town when she needs help?”

Caleb says, “We’ve had women give birth before.”

Scully ignores him and makes eye contact with Joanne. “Were any of them your daughter?”

* * *

 

When they set out an hour later, Scully brings a bag of medical supplies and hops into one of the covered carts just to get out of the compound. She knows Will will have to answer for her absence, and she’s sorry for it. _It’s not fair_ , he’d said. For her to leave him here by himself to make excuses for her, to take on her responsibilities: of course it’s not fair. But that doesn’t mean she has any choice.

She doesn’t see him before she leaves.

* * *

 

They travel for a week.

On foot, the days are long, and they don’t make much progress. By the time night falls Scully’s feet and hips are aching, and she feels every one of her fifty-five years. Back in the day she could’ve done this in heels.

They stop at every settlement they pass, sometimes just for a few hours. Overnight, if they can hack it: nights on the open road feel even longer than the days, and more dangerous. At every stop Scully dispenses homemade medicine, sets bones, examines old wounds. For someone who spent most of her medical career with the dead, she’s a surprisingly good frontier doctor.

At every settlement she asks about the radio; at every settlement they shake their heads. Everyone’s listening and no one is speaking.

On the eighth day, as she presses a foul-smelling poultice into a cut on a man’s shin — he got it from a chain-link fence, and what she’d give for a few doses of tetanus vaccine in the new world — he tells her, “Sure, there’s a station a few miles down the road. Maybe a day’s travel.”

She keeps working. Says, casually: “You’re sure?”

He nods. “Some of those Bible people. I bet you’ve heard ‘em some nights. They’d probably let you use it. Don’t know what it would cost.”

 _I’ll pay it,_ she thinks, _whatever it is_.

After he’s bandaged up he draws a map in her notebook. The town is in the direction they’re traveling, more or less, and she traces the lines with her finger. So close.

“Dr. Scully!” It’s one of the kids from the caravan, breathing heavily, like he ran here. He looks nervous. Most of them act that way around her; she’s not sure why. “You gotta come out. Something’s wrong.”

She dog-ears the page with the map — she used to hate when Mulder did that — and shoves the notebook into her pocket, keeping it close.

The kid breaks out in a run, and Scully follows.


	15. Chapter 15

After she examines Joanne’s daughter — Scully’s been told her name a few times now, but she does her best to avoid learning new names; it only makes things harder — Scully cleans her hands and heads for the hall.

The girl looks up at her, her blue eyes wide. She’s so young. “You’re not going to leave?”

“I am,” Scully says, “but I’ll be back.” She’s making an awful lot of promises lately.

Joanne jumps to her feet the second the door opens. “Is she—”

Scully is no obstetrician, but the girl has lost a lot of blood, and there are no diagnostic ultrasounds, no blood supply or sterile equipment. “You can’t move her,” she says flatly. “She’ll need to stay here until it’s time. Probably a few days.”

At the same time, Caleb says, “That’s not an option” and Joanne says, “I won’t leave her.”

Caleb throws his hands up. “Then you stay, too. I don’t care. But we need to keep moving for as long as the days stay long.”

Scully looks at Joanne. “Choose,” she says quietly.

* * *

The caravan moves on that afternoon. Joanne stays behind and Payton goes with them, up to the mountains.

Before they leave Scully pulls her aside. She knows Will likes her; she knows Payton is a good kid. “You can stay with us, too,” she says. “And when I go back to the compound, we can travel together.”

Payton looks past her, toward the hills and the sky. After a moment, she says, “Do you ever feel like you’re walking on a tightrope? Like you’re just swaying up there while the wind blows you wherever? And every step you take, you’re just praying you don’t fall off?”

The sun is halfway down the sky, and it feels like a thousand years since Scully made a real choice, one where her hand wasn’t forced. She says, quietly, “Yes.”

Payton nods. “I’m not going to fall. I’m jumping.”

* * *

Three days later, the baby is born. A boy, pink as the dawn with a mass of black hair.

The girl’s name is Sara. She hasn’t named her son yet. Scully asks, gently as she can, who the father is.

Sara doesn’t take her eyes from the baby. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “He’s mine.”

* * *

It’s been a long time since Scully traveled alone, and she’s on edge the whole time. The road is exposed but the forests contain another set of horrors, and at least out in the open she’ll see her death coming.

Scully holds her bag close to her side and Mulder’s gun in front of her. She’d relinquished her own when she and Will first came to the compound and she’s never asked for it back, but this one didn’t get found when they were first searched. The feel of his gun in her hands is reassuring; it’s a weight she knows how to carry.

The gun, a compass, a hand-drawn map.

After six hours of walking she reaches the spot marked on the map: an old farm. A fence with a barbed-wire top surrounding a white wooden house, a stable, a barn. No one’s guarding the gate when she reaches it.

She doesn’t call out. Dusk is coming on and she looks for a light in the window, the rustle of a curtain, but the land is silent. There isn’t a blade of grass moving; even the air is still.

Carefully she makes her way through the long grass.

The air inside the farmhouse is stale and old. She half expects to find it like so many places that were abandoned in the aftermath: plates left out on the table, glasses with lipstick stains, books open on coffee tables, and no bodies anywhere.

It doesn’t take a minute before she spots the first body.

A girl, maybe nine years old, in a brown dress. She’s not long dead. The house doesn’t even smell. There’s dirt on her palms and under her fingernails. Around her neck is a gold chain with a small gold cross pendant, and Scully instinctively reaches for her own.

It’s gone, of course. She can’t even remember what happened to it, or when she last saw it.

From a cursory investigation the cause of death isn’t obvious. There are no wounds on her body except blisters on her hands, no blood or fluids soaking into the floorboards. Not that it means much: plenty of things can kill you in ways that don’t leave a mark.

Scully makes her way through the rest of the house, opening every door and flinching every time, waiting for something — someone — to fall out on top of her. But the rest of the house is deserted. Everything is in order, blankets folded and beds made, like this was planned. Surely they didn’t leave that little girl behind here to fend for herself.

In the kitchen a door leads to the backyard and the fields, and she goes outside.

The wind gusts up suddenly, and Scully closes her eyes against the rising dust. When she opens them again, she sees.

They have planted a field of bodies.

Fresh graves spaced a few feet apart, as far as she can see. She starts counting the mounds but then she stops. There are no weeds growing and the dirt hasn’t settled; whatever happened here happened fast.

Next to the house Scully sees a shovel with a blood-stained handle. That little girl, with her blistered hands.

Scully picks it up and starts to dig.

* * *

When the girl is buried, Scully goes back inside the house. For the first time in a long time, she prays.

The transmitter sits on the mantel over the fireplace.

WIth shaking hands she picks it up. It’s small; it looks home-made. Battery powered, and there’s a bag full of extra batteries behind it. She’ll take them with her when she goes. The dead can’t use them, and those batteries could buy a lot of antibiotics for the living.

She turns the transmitter on and it hums to life in her hands.

They never called for help, and Scully had buried the last of them. There won’t be any answers. This house smells like death; it smells like the future.

The sun gives up and slides below the horizon, but she’s spent enough nights with the dead that she doesn’t fear them. _Mulder, I’ve found you a haunted house._

The transmitter hums. Scully sits in the dark and doesn’t cry.


	16. Chapter 16

He’s spent all day scouring maps, but his profiling skills are out of practice, and anyway in all their years together he’d never really managed to get into Scully’s head. She resisted all his attempts at categorization, and he loved her for it. Mulder never wanted anything that came easy.

So many roads, so many forests. So many places for someone to get lost. He knows something about how easy it is to lose people, and how hard it is to find them again.

There have been nights when he’d swear Will was reaching out to him. He dreams of Scully and Will somewhere safe, he dreams of a valley. He dreams of those tomatoes they ate just weeks after the world ended. He dreams that Will is finally taller than him.

He dreams of his own father, shrouded in shadow, whispering: _All of this is part of the plan._

Late into the night he’s circling towns and calculating distances. If they’d walked for a week or a month or a year, if they got a ride, if they went north or south. What the fuck was Skinner talking about, he’s as blind as anyone. All of Mulder’s notes are just guesswork.

Well past midnight Frohike bangs on the door to Mulder’s room in the way only Frohike can: simultaneously sing-song and arrhythmic. Mulder rubs his temples.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, “just let yourself in.”

Frohike shoulders the door open, carrying a radio in one hand and a flask in the other. Mulder eyes both objects with equal interest.

He takes a long swig from the flask, then passes it along. “Have a drink, Mulder.”

Mulder sniffs at it and winces. Smells homemade. He drinks it anyway, and barely manages to keep it down. He forces the words out of his burning throat. “What are we drinking to, Frohike?”

Without a word, Frohike flips the radio on.

It’s just mumbling, incoherent. Someone’s reading off numbers. “Six-point-three.” A woman’s voice, then more static. “Eighty-two…”

“Fascinating,” Mulder says dryly. He gets up and stretches. It’s possible he’s been sitting here since nine a.m.

“Shut up and listen.”

The voice says, “Mulder, it’s me.”

Mulder sits back down.

The signal’s bad but she’s unmistakable. More numbers, the word _north_. Coordinates.

_Coordinates._

Frohike says, “That’s what we’re drinking to.”

* * *

They’re still drinking an hour later, scribbling notes every time Scully’s voice comes through. Finally the maps are of some use. The signal is intermittent, but from the numbers they piece together a couple of possibilities. Her voice is monotone, like she’s reading the traffic report: _just your typical congestion on the Beltway_.

But she’s telling him that she and Will are alive, that she’s left him a message, and if he lets himself think about it too long he’s not going to be able to get anything done. His own heartbeat is the loudest sound in the world.

“She must have heard you,” Frohike says, shaking his head. “You gave us a lot of shit about that radio.”

Mulder shrugs. “I was trying to keep you out of trouble.”

“Skinner knew about it. He didn’t care.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t go shouting it to the rooftops.” And Skinner wasn’t the issue. It’s everyone else he worries about, the contractors and mercenaries, the shadows that run this place from the basement. Everyone knows: you don’t leave without permission, you don’t contact anyone, you don’t share the location of the base. People have disappeared for a lot less than building a contraband radio transmitter.

Frohike mutters something disparaging about how Mulder’s lost his edge, which is probably true. When they were younger, he didn’t have so much to lose.

He looks at the places he’s circled on the map, at the distance between them. God, it’s almost nothing. Three days’ walk, at the worst. This whole time.

“I’ll cover for you,” Frohike says brightly. “Tell ‘em you went crazy and joined the mountain cult.”

“Thanks.” It’s sarcastic, but he also really, really means it.

“Think Skinner will give you a gun?”

Mulder bites his lip, runs his hand through his hair. He thinks about the last conversation he had with Skinner. The bodies in the basement and the blood running through his son’s veins. “Don’t tell him,” Mulder says. “Not Skinner. Not anyone.”

Frohike gives him a long look, but Mulder doesn’t offer any further explanation. And then his old friend says, “How about I help you steal a gun?”

Mulder grins.


	17. Chapter 17

With a shudder, Matt picks up the needle. “I’m not cut out for this,” he says, and that’s pretty obvious: pale-faced with shaking hands, Matt doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

“Yeah, well, neither was I,” Will says, rolling up his sleeve and holding out his arm. “You get used to it.”

Matt barely manages to tie the band around Will’s upper arm, and he actually averts his eyes when he goes to put the needle in.

“Dude, you have to look!”

“Right,” Matt says, swallowing, “that makes sense.”

For all the things Matt saw during his months on the road — and Will knows a lot of it, but he’s sure there’s plenty more to tell, and worse — he’s still incredibly squeamish about blood. And, actually, everything: yesterday Will set a dislocated shoulder and Matt went and threw up in the courtyard. But five minutes later he came back into the trailer and went back to work. Whether he’s cut out for it or not, he’s doing it, and that’s most of the battle.

Finally Matt’s able to draw enough blood for Will to work with. He pulls the needle out and, businesslike, holds a piece of gauze to the crook of Will’s elbow and ties a band around it. He hands the vial over.

“Do you really think this’ll work?” Matt asks.

Will doesn’t answer him. At the other end of the trailer there’s a big plastic box where he’s been storing the contaminated soil in a slanted tray. He stands over it and lets a few drops of blood drip down into the dirt.

From behind him Matt says, “I still think this is crazy,” and Will ignores him.

When his dad was sick, what had he done? The contamination had been easy to find. It had been like — like he could see inside his dad’s blood vessels. Or not see, exactly, but sense — and all he could sense was the pathogen. His dad’s blood, the good cells, he only knew them by omission, by the negative space. And when his mom injected Will’s blood into his dad’s arm, he could see that too, and direct it, the same way he directs his limbs, his eyes, his mouth. In the enclosed spaces of arteries and veins, it had been easy.

Now he closes his eyes, reaching for his own cells as they sink and spread into the dirt. They’re infiltrators, spies, reporting back to him. The pathogen is everywhere in this sample of topsoil. He wonders how far down it goes.

Will pushes his cells, the good cells, deeper into the dirt, hunting down the pathogen. And just like last time, the effects are almost immediate.

It’s so little blood, really. Just a tiny fraction of the tiny amount in the vial, and yet.

He hears Matt’s voice, thick and strange, like he’s underwater. “Whoa.”

There’s a thick black sludge pooled at the bottom of the bin. On the raised tray, the dirt is still there. When Will _reaches_ again, it’s clear. Just like it was with his dad. Will wonders what would happen if he just left his blood in there to work without his direction, if it would have the same effect.

Matt starts to reach into the box, but Will stops him. “Don’t touch it.”

He backs off but doesn’t turn his gaze away. “What does it mean?” he asks. “That you can do that.”

Will stares into the sludge. It’s oily and viscous, and it looks alive, somehow. It’s the stuff of nightmares. He says, “I have no idea.”

* * *

“Hey, Will. They need you at the gate for a check.” Caroline’s standing at the door with her arms crossed, looking vaguely peeved. She doesn’t like playing messenger.

All things considered, people had handled the news about Will’s mom pretty well. Will’s not an idiot. He knows it’s part of the reason his mom left him behind, whether she intended it or not: he’s collateral. Everyone here knows she wouldn’t abandon him forever.

Probably not, anyway.

Will pulls on his gloves, like he’s seen his mom do dozens of times. Matt hands him a mask. Standard procedure.

Curious, he closes his eyes and _reaches_ toward the gate. He’s done this a few times before, trying to get a sense of what people want before they’re allowed in. It’s always the same. People are hungry and tired and desperate; he’s never sensed any malice or deceit.

Until now.

Will shivers in the late-summer heat. Caroline stares back at him. “You all right, kid?”

“Who’s out there?” His voice is suddenly hoarse.

She shrugs. “A bunch of men. Kind of old. Weird, right?”

All men — that’s never a good sign. If there are no women or children with them, there is always a reason. Dread pools in his stomach. He reaches out again and everything he senses from them is bitter cold.

“Tell them to go,” he says urgently. Caroline’s still just staring at him but he knows if anyone here will believe him, it’s her. “They want something. I can’t — I can’t tell what. But you can’t let them in. Caroline. Tell them to leave.”

_They want something._

He reaches for a third time and then, a split second later, he feels a response. That’s not supposed to happen, they’re not supposed to notice him, but someone’s probing. Someone who feels almost familiar, in a way he can’t quite place, but familiar or not they only intend him harm. Immediately he withdraws.

And in a flash Will knows exactly what they want.

“Okay,” she says slowly, and as she turns away he gets a wave of déjà vu, strong enough to barrel him over. Like a dream he sees it: Caroline turning away, just like this, her dark hair swinging behind her. Caroline on the ground with her throat cut.

Will chases her out into the courtyard. He grabs her arm.

“Ouch!”

“Don’t go out there. It’s dangerous. Get someone else.” Will swallows hard. “They’re looking for me.”

Her eyes go wide, bewildered. “What? Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. But they can’t know I’m here, they can’t — someone has to tell them I left. Tell them I went with my mom, just — _something_.” He runs a hand through his hair so it sticks up and he’s sure he looks crazy, but he needs her to know.

Slowly she backs away from him, like he’s the one who’s dangerous. “Will…”

“Please.”

He reaches out again, and it overwhelms him. Behind his eyelids a vision of the men at the gate, the guards standing around, waiting for him. What did they tell them? Not his name, please not his name.

Whether he’s imagining it or actually hearing what’s happening at the gate, the words ring in his head. “What’s taking him so long? Dr. Scully never makes us wait around.”

And a flash again. Bodies on the ground, everyone he knows in the new world. Their blood slick on the tile floors, the summer flies buzzing. With a moan Will grabs his head, willing the visions to stop. Just stop.

Caroline grabs him by the shoulders. “Are you okay? Will?”

He feels like he’s choking. For a second the world goes black and then spins and spins and spins, and when the spinning finally stops he says, “Tell them I went north.”

“Oh my God. Will—”

“And find a gun,” he says, swallowing his terror. “They’re coming.”


	18. Chapter 18

Matt doesn’t believe in aliens, whatever Will or Caroline says. In that way, at least, he is like his father: Matthew Scully believes in things that you can hold with your hands, things you can see and smell and know.

He doesn’t believe in aliens, but he does believe that the world is a cruel place, and that the men in it are cruel, too.

And he does believe in Will.

So when Will tells him, “Grab your stuff. We have to go”, Matt doesn’t hesitate, not even for a second.

They don’t have much and it doesn’t take more than a few minutes for them to gather what they need: clothes, food, medicine. At the last second Matt grabs the vial of Will’s blood and stuffs it in his pocket. He takes the tray of treated dirt and dumps it out the door.

As they make their way to the gate, clinging to the sides of buildings, they hear shouts and the clang of metal and the soft dull thud of bodies hitting the ground. He can’t shut his eyes or his ears and he can’t turn around: he remembers all those years of Vacation Bible School, sin and regret and pillars of salt and when God tells you to go, you go.

He doesn’t look back.


	19. Chapter 19

She sleeps during the day and stays up all night, repeating the same message over and over again. She doesn’t dare bring the transmitter anywhere else; it’s a finicky thing.

She sleeps during the day and in the night the dead sit beside her. She dreams of the people who lived in this house. That little girl. Someone told her once, Before, that there were more people alive at that moment than had ever died; she imagines, now, the afterlife overrun with lost souls. So many dead and nowhere for them to go. The field behind the house had shocked her, but the entire world is a graveyard now.

Two days in, she finds a notebook. Someone had knocked it down so it’s wedged between a desk and the wall.

The pages are almost full. Each entry is dated, and they start just a few weeks After. Almost two years ago, now.

Towards the end, the handwriting shifts every few entries. Block letters, neatly printed; imperfect cursive not so different from her own; and finally, at the end, a little girl’s handwriting. Hearts over the letter _i_.

It says, _Seth died. I think I am next. I buryd him but it took a long time. I am alone. I prayd and now I will go pray agin._

* * *

When she left the compound she carried with her a week’s worth of food, a gun, her notebook. Even so, she doesn’t know how long she’ll stay here, how long she’ll hold out hope. If she has to go she’ll leave a message behind, but she won’t leave the coordinates for the compound, not now. She has no idea who’s listening.

Every night she writes in the notebook, to track the date if nothing else. She will not lose track of time. She will remember.

She thinks of Will, doing the job she’s supposed to do. _I’m coming back_ , she thinks, willing the message to get to him. He’s read her mind before. _Just give me a few more days._

* * *

In the middle of the night the door creaks, and the only thing Scully can think is that it’s a ghost.

But then there are footsteps on the creaky floorboards, and Scully is suddenly overcome by the obvious: that, though her message didn’t send every stranger listening to the radio to the compound, to her friends, to her son, she did send any listeners directly to _her_. Alone in a field of the dead, miles from anyone living.

At night the house is dark and full of shadows even deeper. She creeps into one and holds Mulder’s gun in her steady hands.

She can hear the intruder as he steps through the house. He’s walking heavily — he must think the house is empty, that no one can hear him — and just a little unevenly. Time was, Scully could tell a lot about a suspect from their footsteps in the dark. She’s badly out of practice but still she thinks, _it’s a man, he’s tall, he has an injury_ —

A silhouette appears in the kitchen. Scully raises her gun.

The figure mutters, “There’s gotta be a candle here somewhere”, and her heart stutters.

Scully lowers the gun. She steps from the shadows.

His head snaps toward the sound of her footsteps. There’s just enough light coming in through the windows for her to see his face.

She says, “Mulder.”

* * *

She’s lost time before. Nine minutes. Days, months.

Later, she won’t be able to say how much time passed between the moment she said his name and the moment her heart started beating again. Later, the years between the moment he told her to run and the moment she saw him again will bleed together, an undifferentiated mass. She’ll never understand the power he has to compress and draw out time, to make her life feel at the same time too brief and, somehow, infinite.

Now.

Scully closes her eyes. When she opens them again, he’s still there.

* * *

Mulder stuffs his hand in his pocket like he doesn’t know what else to do with it; his other arm hangs at his side, the sleeve empty at the bottom. That uneven gait; she should’ve known.

Mulder, here. Mulder, not dead. How could she ever have thought he was?

His smile is crooked. His voice rough from disuse, he says, “What’s new, Scully?“

And she laughs: a bright peal of laughter that echoes through the empty house, that lights up the darkness.


	20. Chapter 20

Mulder remembers when Scully came back from the dead the first time.

They were so young then. It had seemed impossible, at thirty-three, to contemplate the rest of his life without her, and really he’d barely known her at all. He’d signed the paperwork that told the doctors to pull the plug, never imagining that it would come to pass; he remembers the regret, thick like bile in his throat.

He remembers the phone call, how all the air left his body at once. He remembers hovering at the threshold of her hospital room. He remembers how blue her eyes were, and how wide.

* * *

 

He holds her wrist in his hand, lightly, feeling for the pulse that beats there. There is more gray in her hair now, she is thinner, she is stronger.

“I didn’t think you’d be here,“ he says. He shifts just a little, and the couch groans under their weight. "I was looking for a message. A letter. Something.”

She snuggles up against him. “I wanted to wait here for a few days. Just in case.”

“What about Will?”

“He’s safe,” she says. “We’ve been living in a settlement not too far from here. He’s still there. With Matthew.”

He whistles low. “Matt’s alive? Good kid.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” she admits. “I’d left messages for him in a dozen towns, but I never thought he’d find them.”

It makes him wonder who else is out there, old friends or enemies. There is still so much they don’t know.

“If this isn’t where you live, where are we?”

She swallows. “Hell.“ She looks around the living room and he follows her gaze, takes in the wood paneling, the slipcovered furniture. It all looks pretty innocuous to him. After a moment she adds, “There’s a field of bodies behind the house.”

She says it the way you might comment on an unusual decor choice, like something worth noting, but not worth thinking about.

He starts to say something, but she continues, “I came here because I heard they had a transmitter. When I got here there was a dead girl, lying about there.” She gestures to a spot on the floor. “I don’t know how many of them she buried herself, but her hands were covered in burst blisters.”

“What killed her?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I assume it’s the same disease that killed everyone else here. It doesn’t take long for sickness to spread in communities like this. There must’ve been fifty, sixty people living in three buildings here — in the summer heat — it could’ve been anything.” She doesn’t say it, but he hears it: it could’ve been _anything_. Diptheria, cholera, an invariably fatal alien virus. There’s no telling these days.

Both of them should know by now how fragile human beings are. They spent enough years in morgues and hospital rooms. He runs his hand down her spine, tracing each vertebra. She shivers under his touch.

And she says, "What took you so long?”

His hand stills. Part of it is exactly the thing that stopped them from searching for Matt: he was overwhelmed by the impossibility of it, by vastness of their newly disconnected world. And the other part, which is somehow even harder to say out loud: “I thought I was keeping you safe.”

She looks up at him, eyebrow raised. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been living in a government facility,” he says, and she stiffens in his arms. “And I don’t know how I got there.”

“What?”

He tangles his hand in her hair and listens to her sigh, buying himself time. None of this is easy to explain. “After you left, somebody — something — shot me. I remember lying on the floor in our kitchen, but I woke up in a clinic hundreds of miles away. Skinner says I showed up banging at the door holding the wound shut, but I don’t remember any of it.”

“So…”

“Someone brought me there, Scully; there’s no way I traveled that distance with that kind of injury. Not on my own.”

There’s a pause, and in the silence he hears that scream again, sees the searchlights scanning their little lake, their home. Someone was looking for them then — there’s no reason to assume they gave up.

She whispers, “What do you think they want?”

“The same thing they’ve always wanted.”

“William,” she says. “Mulder, I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. But Skinner—”

“Skinner’s alive?”

He nods. “The other day, Skinner told me to go find him. William. There were men in the basement, undergoing treatment for the same thing that I — that Will cured. He wants to see if it would work again.”

Scully is hesitant. “That seems…reasonable.”

“Maybe. But the timing’s strange, isn’t it. We find a way to reach out to you, and Skinner tries to send me away?”

“You’ve always been the one who said we could trust him.”

“I still think that.” He pauses. “Mostly.”

“Mulder, what if.” There’s a long pause. He watches her as she goes through her familiar rituals of concern, of consideration; she runs her tongue along her lower lip, props herself up on one elbow. “Mulder, what if it’s true? What if Will is the key?”

“He’s just a kid.”

“I know. And I don’t want it to be true, either. But you didn’t see it. The way he cured you — I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Has he done anything else like that?”

“No,“ Scully admits. "But his — his powers, whatever they are — there are things he can do now, things he couldn’t do before. He doesn’t tell me, but I can see it. Whatever’s happening to the world is happening to him, too. And it’s not killing him. It’s making him stronger.”

Once, a long time ago. In a hotel somewhere, Mulder can’t remember now where, or exactly when, but he remembers Will sitting between them, afraid of the future; he remembers what he told his son. His voice cracks. “I promised we wouldn’t let anything happen to him.”

Where it rests on his chest, Scully’s hand tightens just briefly into a fist. After a while she says, “We promised a lot of things.”

He tugs her up so her face is even with his; he looks up into her eyes, as blue as they ever were. “I love you,” he says, and he can’t remember the last time he said it, and somewhere in the back of his head he’s just saying it over and over and over again.

Her hair falls in a curtain around them. She brushes her lips against his, and they’re chapped and warm when she whispers, “I love you” against the side of his neck, but she doesn’t make any more promises.


	21. Chapter 21

In the dead of night, the air is still warm and heavy. Even if they could light a fire — even if all the wood and brush around them wasn’t infected, toxic — they wouldn’t want to.

Not to mention the attention it would attract. Will doesn’t know what all is out here in the woods, but he can’t imagine that any of it is friendly.

They’ve set up for the night in what must be an old hunting cabin: no plumbing, no insulation, but it’s shelter and it hides them. Both of them are studiously ignoring the skeleton tucked into the twin bed in the corner. They’ve gotten used to things like that.

Matt chews on the last couple lentils from the bottom of the pouch, making them last. When he’s finally done, he shoves the pouch away and leans back against the wall, staring at Will. “So who are they?”

“I have no idea,” he says. “I mean, I don't…”

Matt gives him a skeptical look. “Then how’d you know to run away?”

“I just…I had a bad feeling.”

“Come on.”

“Look, I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“My dad always thought you were a weirdo,” Matt says dryly. “Was he right?”

Will laughs out loud. “Uh, yeah. That’s one way to put it.” He thinks back to when they were kids, to all the times he knew things he wasn’t supposed to know, overheard conversations he shouldn’t have been able to overhear. “I mean, your dad thought that because I…I always knew stuff I shouldn’t have, right? Like, I’d overhear a conversation that happened in a different part of the house, or the other half of a phone conversation. Shit like that.”

“So you’re psychic.”

“I don’t know if that’s exactly right.”

“But that’s what you did with the dirt? Some kind of…like, ESP?”

“Telekinesis, maybe?” He swallows. “But see, that’s the weird part. I can’t do that with everything. It’s because of where it came from.”

“The aliens.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Matt lies back, elbows spread, his head resting on his hands. “You know it all sounds like bullshit, right,” he says to the ceiling. “It sounds like you’re trying to take this thing — this thing that doesn’t make any sense, that the whole world just fucking keeled over and died — and make a story out of it. A story about you.”

Will bites his tongue. He won’t get defensive. He won’t. “I know how it sounds,” he finally says, his tone even.

“On the other hand, those dudes showed up there just as soon as Aunt Dana left.”

At the mention of his mom Will flinches. God, what’s she going to think when she goes back? If everyone there is dead or gone, and he’s missing.

They sit together in the deepening dark. Outside it starts to rain, and each drop sizzles on the steel roof.

Will says, “I don’t want the story to be about me.”

Matt shrugs. “Why not? At least then there’d be a reason.”

“I used to dream about it. When I was a kid. Not this exactly, but that the world was ending, and I was the only one who could stop it.” Will scrunches up his jacket and sticks it under his head. He curls up on the wooden floor, facing away from his cousin. The cabin has no windows and he’s glad. It almost feels safe. “At the end of the dream I died.”

Silence. Even the rain stops. His own breathing is the only thing he can hear; it’s amplified in the small space.

“I used to dream I was Batman,” Matt says, finally. “But so far that hasn’t panned out.”

Will snickers despite himself. “That’s actually kind of reassuring.”

“Now shut up and go to sleep,” Matt says. There’s a rustling sound, and then his voice is muffled by the blanket. “Just try not to dream anything that’ll kill us.”

* * *

In the morning they gather up their stuff. Will pulls the blanket over the skeleton. It’s not as good as a burial, but it’s better than nothing. Matt bows his head and says something Catholic-sounding, and Will thinks about the necklace his mom used to wear. Will has never believed in any of that stuff and he’s not sure Matt does either, but he understands the comfort in ritual, in doing the things your parents taught you to do. In being the person they raised you to be.

After the rain the sun is bright and the air is cooler, drier. If he ignores the signs of rot and infection on the trees, or the fact that the moss has turned a radioactive shade of violet, or the silence in the trees, Will can almost imagine that the world is normal again. He’s just out for a hike with his cousin.

They look around the clearing.

“Where are we gonna go?” Matt asks, and Will closes his eyes just for a second. Five years ago — okay, even two years ago — this would have thrilled him. Matt, asking _him_ what they should do. It’s so opposed to the natural order of things, but so’s everything now.

They can’t go back to the settlement. He doesn’t know where his mom went. But he does know where Payton went, and he knows where even a bunch of scary old men with guns could get themselves in trouble.

Will bites his lip. “Where it’ll be hard to follow,” he says. “The mountains.”


	22. Chapter 22

They make good time on the way back to the settlement. Mostly they’re quiet: there’s too much to say, and it’s a relief just to look at him.

It’s late afternoon when the compound comes into sight. It’s dappled gold and green in the fading light, through the trees, and Scully finds her eyes suddenly bright. She fights the urge to race to the gate, to have Will and Mulder both with her, to never let either of them go again.

They crest the last hill and come to the gate, and no one is there at all.

Scully chokes back a moan.

“Scully?”

He doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t. He’s never been here before. “There are always people stationed here,” she says. “Always.”

Mulder’s voice is uncertain. “Maybe they got hungry.”

Through the fence Scully sees a cloud of insects, hovering low to the ground. The wind picks up and carries on it a too-familiar scent. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t think so.”

* * *

The trailer’s been cleaned out. Will’s backpack is gone. So are all of their spare rations and a couple of emergency first aid kits. Scully opens the closet door a half-dozen times, as though it might change what’s inside. Her grip on the stainless steel handle is iron. Her hands turn white. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t scream. She swallows it whole.

Mulder states the obvious. “Scully. He’s not here.”

“I left him,” she says, like she can’t quite believe it. “Mulder, I _left him_ here.”

“Hey.” He puts his hand on her shoulder, trying to steady her. It doesn’t help. “There’s no way you could have known.”

She chokes on every word. “I _should have_ known.” Scully throws his hand off and pivots away, burying her face in her hands. “It happens _all the time_.” How many fucking times has she gone to some cluster of houses, a gas station or an old Wendy’s, full of people, only to find them all dead or missing a week later?

“You’d know if he was—” Mulder doesn’t actually say the word _dead_ , but she hears it. He sounds desperate. “Wouldn’t you?”

Every possible response dies in her throat. She tries to unclench her muscles for long enough to shake her head. Maybe it works.

They circle the compound. They open every door and look under every piece of furniture. Still no bodies except the five in the courtyard. None of them were William.

In the cafeteria she finally hears something other than their own echoing footsteps. She raises her hand to stop Mulder from moving — he’s still a loud walker — and crouches toward the source of the sound.

The kitchen. Scully yanks open the door.

There are three people huddled inside. Two residents of the compound who are around Will’s age, Caroline and Ian, and an older woman Scully recognizes but couldn’t name. All three of them are ragged, covered in blood with shadows under their eyes. When they realize it’s her, there’s a collective exhale.

“Dr. Scully,” Caroline says, somewhere just below a whisper.

Scully drops to her knees beside her. There’s a gash over her eyebrow that’s healing badly. It needed stitches three days ago. Scully digs through her bag for an antibiotic wipe and then dabs at the wounds on Caroline’s face and neck. The girl doesn’t even flinch. “What happened here?” she asks quietly.

Caroline closes her eyes. “Will knew,” she says. “I don’t know how.”

She fights the urge to cut past all of this to her real question — _where is my son_ — and just listens.

“These men showed up at the gate,” Caroline says. “The guards told me to go get Will, to do the medical exam. He was — he was in the trailer, but when I told him he went all pale and distant. Like he was looking at something I couldn’t see.” With every word her voice gets rougher, and when she swallows painfully Scully curses herself for not noticing sooner.

“Here,” Scully says, offering Caroline her water bottle.

The girl swallows gratefully, then passes the bottle back to her companions. “He warned us, but it was too late. When I went back out they’d already…” She pauses. “They’d already killed the guards. It was Cassie and Wallace, and they — they _shot_ them, and they’re dead, and I don’t know who else is dead too — and the men, they knew about you, Dr. Scully. They asked for you.”

It feels like all the blood leaves her body. After a long moment, she says, “Are you sure?”

Caroline nods, barely.

“Is it just the three of you left here?”

They exchange glances. “I think so,” Caroline says. “A lot of people ran. But we’ve been in here for a while. We haven’t exactly gone out to look.”

“That was smart.” Mulder’s voice, and it catches her by surprise. She’s not used to it yet, having him back. The idea that the person sneaking up behind her could be a friend rather than an enemy.

Caroline’s eyes flicker up to Mulder and suddenly light up, curious. “Is that — are you Will’s dad?”

Scully turns her head to look at him as he gives a solemn nod. And Caroline is transformed. A minute ago she looked like she was about to faint, and now awe is coloring her cheeks pink.

“Will told me about you,” Caroline gushes. “I’ve read every article you ever wrote. He thought — he thought you were dead. And I mean, what a tragedy, for someone so brilliant and—”

Oh, Scully knows this type: the young women who’d show up in droves at every reading Mulder ever did, calling him “Fox” and quoting to him from his own books.

Of all the things to survive the apocalypse. She’s actually kind of glad.

Scully cuts her off, less grumpy than she could be. “Caroline, what happened to Will?”

The girl’s eyes focus on Scully again. She looks like she just woke up from a dream. Scully fights to keep from rolling her eyes, and she absolutely refuses to turn around and see the smug look on Mulder’s face. She can just imagine him later: _See, I’ve still got it._

“He ran away,” she says slowly. “I mean, not in like, a cowardly way. Everybody was leaving if they could. I think I saw him and Matt together, just outside the gate.“

“So they got out? They’re alive?”

“They were alive three days ago.”

This is not much of a guarantee, and Scully knows it. But it’s so much better than finding out that her son is buried here in the toxic ground or decomposing in some closet they haven’t checked yet. There’s a lump in her throat that she can’t swallow.

Caroline’s brows draw together. "Hang on. There’s one other thing — Will told me, before he left. He told me to tell them, the men at the gate, that he was going north.” Her eyes go wide. “Do you think that means—?”

North. North would be the safe way to go. Towards familiar villages, places they know and trust.

So of course he’d go in any other direction. Will has always been his father’s son.

Scully spends the rest of the afternoon attending to the trio’s wounds. Shallow cuts and bruises; they’ll be fine. While she works Mulder buries the bodies in the courtyard in a shallow grave, keeping them from the flies and whatever else might scent human flesh and come calling.

 _And who came calling for me?_ What manner of beast, to show up at her door and murder her friends and chase her son into the dark unknown?

That night she stares into the settlement’s weapons closet. She finds her gun and slips its familiar weight into her pocket. Sets her jaw.

She’s hunted this kind of beast before.


	23. Chapter 23

The days are long and brutally hot. They didn’t bring nearly enough water with them, and by the second day Will has completely stopped sweating, which can’t be a good sign.

When the sun is high overhead they stop to rest. Matt collapses to the ground, sprawling his limbs. “We’re gonna die out here,” he moans skyward. He turns his head to look at Will. “What about your trick with the dirt? Couldn’t that work with water?”

For a second Will lights up. “Maybe,” he says, but it only takes a moment for him to see the problem. “It might work for the pathogen, but not for, like, _e. coli_. There’s lots of nasty shit in this water that isn’t alien.”

Matt licks his dry lips. “What if we boiled it?”

“Sure. Let’s send up a smoke signal.”

“Don’t be a dick. I’m just thinking.”

“Think better,” Will mutters. They have maybe half a gallon of water left between them. He knows Matt’s right, and he has absolutely no solutions.

As they slog through the woods, they pass cabins like the one they stayed in the first night. They’ve been searching all of them, usually finding something of value — food, Neosporin, a single band-aid. Will keeps his fingers crossed for iodine tablets, but no dice.

They reach the base of the mountains early in the evening and bed down for the night in a cabin that’s more like a shack, the wooden walls mostly rotted through and a dirt floor. As the sun falls below the horizon Will waits for the heat to break, but it never does; the air is humid, unrelenting. A poem half-remembered. He can picture it on the page of his ninth-grade English textbook. _Water, water, everywhere; nor any drop to drink_.

He opens his mouth wider, like he could drink the air if he just tried hard enough.

Before they go to bed, they each take a sip of water. It’s warm from the sun and the heat, but it’s still the best thing Will’s ever tasted.

It only takes moments for Matt to fall asleep. For Will, it’s harder. Every day it’s harder; every night he spends hours staring into the black. He doesn’t get tired anymore. Sometimes it feels like he only sleeps out of habit.

He watches Matt tossing and turning in the moist, stagnant air. In the dark he _reaches_ , pretending his powers are like a radio signal, traveling in straight lines during the day, bouncing off every surface and climbing impossible heights after the sun sets.

Will _reaches_ toward his parents, and faintly — faintly — they are there. Sleeping, he thinks: their thoughts are troubled and rocky, but there is a sameness to them that tells him they can’t be conscious. After a moment he leaves them, turning his mind toward the mountains.

If he went outside now, he would see the world full of light. The stars and the full moon, the fires on the slopes, all familiar, and then something new: on a plateau far above them, a tower, glowing dim. Its light pulses like a heartbeat, like there’s something organic in that cold casing. In every panel of glass Will sees his own death. A thousand screens playing a thousand movies, and all of them have the same ending.

The tower, the tower. Something in it knows him, something in it calls. Will’s mind reaches, his blood reaches.

And Will swears he feels the tower reaching _back_.

* * *

 

Will sits bolt upright, gasping for air with sweat pouring down his brow. Matt’s awake too — his hands on Will’s shoulders, his face bloodless. Matt’s hands, his untrimmed fingernails, press into Will’s skin; the sharp pain remembers him.

Wide-eyed and breathless, Will stares at his cousin. “What—”

“You were screaming,” Matt says. He’s shaken, his voice is hoarse.

Will’s throat is too dry to swallow. For a split second he’s back in it again, the tower and the rain and that same dark presence from the attack on the compound.

Whatever is up there, it’s waiting for him.

Will closes his eyes and tries to slow his breathing. He can feel his pulse thrumming in his neck, hummingbird-quick. His human heart, his monstrous blood.

“If you tell me,” Matt says into the silence. “If you tell me, will it make me braver?”

His cousin’s eyes are solemn, his hair is wild. Will thinks they are mirror images. When they were kids everyone thought they were brothers. How similar they are on the outside, when the blood burning through Will’s veins is so foreign. When his blood is the only thing that really matters.

“No,” Will says, finally. “I don’t think so.”

Matt nods. His expression doesn’t change at all. “Dreams aren’t real,” he says, for what has to be the fiftieth time in the last week. And every time he sounds less and less convinced.

* * *

 

They finish the last of their water just as they crest a plateau. The peaks still rise far above them, but the air feels thinner already.

They fight their way through the foliage, trying not to notice how strange it looks, the new tendrils and shoots creeping through the old growth. Will’s memory isn’t photographic but it’s pretty damn good, and he’s sure there were no pictures of these plants in any Peterson Field Guide.

He’s so busy looking down that he doesn’t notice anything else until Matt sticks his arm out to stop him from going any further.

“ _Look_ ,” Matt hisses.

Will looks. And steps back.

The tower is exactly like it was in his visions. Exactly. Tall and glass and wrong against the lush green hills.

They stare up at its impossible height.

“Okay,” Matt says quietly, like it might hear him. “I feel like that’s not supposed to be there.”

Will blinks hard. Maybe it’s a hallucation. God knows he’s dehydrated enough.

But obviously Matt sees it too, and Will believes in a lot of things these days, but shared hallucinations belong to some whole other category of weirdness. Matt says, “Why would somebody build this out here? In the middle of nowhere?”

“Because they knew this was going to happen. The attack.” Will didn’t know it was true until he said it out loud, but now he _knows_.

“Sure, but — why here?”

Will shakes his head. All the maps back at the compound; the maps filed away in his dad’s office. All the things he isn’t supposed to know, about his parents, about himself. He says, “My mom was abducted from these mountains.”

Matt’s face is pale. "My dad said something about that once, to your dad and Grandma. I never heard him talk about it again. She almost died, right?”

“They did something to her,” Will says. “Altered her DNA. It’s why I — why I’m the way I am. At least I think so.”

They stand at the edge of the woods staring up at the tower for a long, long time. “I don’t know what to do,” Will finally says. “I can’t get any read on who’s in there. Like, nothing at all. As far as I can tell, the place is empty.”

“That seems wrong.”

“No kidding.” Will looks at his cousin. “What do you want to do?”

“You’re the one in danger here, man.”

Will stares at him. “They might _kill_ you.”

Matt’s jaw is set, grim. “And that’s the worst thing that possibly can happen to me. You…” He doesn’t say any more. He doesn’t need to.

He looks back into the woods. This forest is huge, and they’re out of water. Continuing on means almost certain death. Staying here means — well, almost certain death, but maybe _not_ watching his cousin die of thirst, and of all the nightmare visions Will has seen firsthand, he’d like to avoid that one. The fact that there’s such a clear hierarchy of good ways to die sort of freaks him out, honestly, but he has to imagine that everyone has lists like that now. Thirst is a bad way to go.

But Will doesn’t get a chance to choose.

Matt’s voice, disembodied: “What the _fuck_ —”

There is a sudden sharp pain behind Will’s eyes. He hears something scream, and then everything goes black.


	24. Chapter 24

While Scully sleeps Mulder watches the shadows move. He thinks about the telescope he had as a kid. He hardly needs one now. The sky is so dark, the stars are so close.

His arm still aches from the graves he dug back in Scully’s town. She hasn’t said anything about it since they left, but she must have known them all.

After her abduction, after she came back, he’d felt like every day she’d been gone was a bridge he needed to cross. It was just a few months, but he felt those lost moments acutely. And this time they lost a year and a half.

He’ll never get those moments back, not any of them. And he knows — he does — that some part of Scully is always, has always been fundamentally unknowable, but now he can’t even pretend. Her white-knuckle grip on her Smith & Wesson, the steel in her eyes.

Mulder lies down and reaches for her, pulling her close. In sleep he knows her as well as he ever has. Her body curves against him, her fingers twine with his.

Eventually the humid air and the deep silence of the forest lure him into sleep, but what feels like just seconds later, he’s startled awake. Scully sits up shaking, bracing herself on her hands. Her eyes open, staring out into the night. He grabs her wrist. “Scully?”

“Will.” Scully breathes deep and closes her eyes again, like she’s trying to go back to wherever she was a few minutes ago. “He’s alive. He was reaching out.”

Yeah, he’s had that dream too. He tries to say it gently. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

The glare she turns on him is deadlier than any gun. “I know the difference.”

From inside Scully’s bag, something buzzes. They look at each other. What it sounds like is something impossible, a sound they both would’ve sworn they’d forgotten. It sounds like a cell phone, vibrating in the bag.

Mulder is the one who gets up to open it. It doesn’t take long to find the source; they don’t carry much. “It’s the radio,” he says, holding it up for her to see. “Just static.”

But Scully doesn’t seem relieved. She scoots back, away from him. “What’s powering it, Mulder?”

He swallows. “Oh.”

The radio buzzes and hums. It’s Scully’s hand-crank radio from back at the settlement; the dial is still set to the station Mulder was broadcasting on.

And somehow, his own voice comes out through the speaker. “This is Radio Nowhere—”

Mulder sets the radio down on the ground and steps away, like it might suddenly catch fire or spontaneously combust. His own voice keeps pouring out, things he remembers saying, days or weeks ago. When he turns to look at Scully her face is white.

And the voice on the radio changes. “Fox Mulder,” it says.

He shudders, then concentrates, trying to place the voice: the slight slurring, the way the voice hangs on the long consonants.

It says, “It’s not too late, Fox.”

Scully is quicker than he is. “Is that—”

He shakes his head, hard. It can’t be, he won’t allow it to be.

The radio says, “Do you think you can find him before we do?”

“Jesus,” Mulder exhales. There are enough horrors in the new world without the dead rising up to taunt him. “I’m hallucinating, right? This is a hallucination.“ It wouldn’t be the first time.

Scully’s lips are a thin line, grim. She doesn’t say a word.

It says, “Remember how long it took you to find your sister, Fox. Remember what was left when you did.”

* * *

Hours pass.

They don’t crank the radio, but it runs on its own power now. They can’t turn it off, and he can’t bring himself to change the dial. The station goes quiet for hours at a time; when it broadcasts, it’s exactly the same as before. A recording, then. That doesn’t comfort him.

“What if we’re going the wrong way?” Scully asks. They’ve stopped to rest somewhere on the side of the mountain, in the shade of a particularly toxic-looking tree. They’ve barely spoken since the radio turned on hours ago. Their fear simmers in the heat.

He can’t stop thinking about Samantha. How she was taken from him so easily; how now, more than forty years later, the same men are trying to steal his son. It feels impossible. That part of his life was supposed to be over.

He is not supposed to still be so powerless.

“You’re the one with a direct line,” Mulder snaps. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Scully grits her teeth and ignores him, which is almost too bad. He feels like fighting — it has to be better than wandering through the woods with no plan.

Mulder cranes his neck back to stare up into the canopy. It’s silent, eerie, not a bird or breeze in sight. As he watches, a plume of smoke creeps up through the trees. The sight is so unfamiliar that it takes him a second to realize what it must mean.

“Scully,” he says.

Her eyes follow his. They watch the smoke dissipate. “Come on,” she says.

Walking as softly as they’re able, they make their way through the green to the source of the smoke. Next to him, Scully’s voice is barely a whisper. “There are men up here,” she says. “Up in these woods. We’d see their fires at night. People said they were killers, cannibals and worse.”

“People say a lot of things,” Mulder says. “Maybe it’s Will.” Probably not, but what other leads do they have?

After a few minutes they hear voices. Mulder puts his hand on his gun.

A baby cries.

He turns to Scully, but she’s already walking ahead of him, her footsteps getting quicker, less cautious. Mulder follows a few steps behind.

“I know them,” she says out loud, more to herself than to him.

There are a handful of people standing in a circle. Arguing, from what it sounds like. There are a couple of women Will’s age; one of them holds a baby. Mulder can’t see the source of the smoke.

One of the men facing away from them looks familiar: about Mulder’s height, young. For a split second he thinks it’s Will, but no: his hair is too light, his shoulders too broad.

The man turns around.

Through the trees they lock eyes. Mulder hears Scully’s footsteps stop, somewhere off to the side, but he doesn’t look away.

A dozen distinct emotions pass over Matt’s face before he finally settles on some toxic combination of sorrow and shame. It’s an easy expression for Mulder to read — he wore it for twenty-five years.

Matt shakes his head, just slightly.

And Mulder knows that Will is gone.


	25. Chapter 25

“Good evening.” A man’s voice, distant. Maybe he’s dreaming. “It looks like you had quite a fall.”

Will comes to, blinking the haze from his eyes. A fall? He doesn’t think so; that doesn’t sound right. Gradually the man comes into focus. He’s old — like, impossibly old — red-rimmed eyes, his voice hoarse. He’s standing a few feet away, his shoulders just slightly hunched.

“I trust you’re feeling better now,” the man says. He smiles. “We don’t want you to miss the show.”

Will was outside, he was with Matt, they were staring up at that tower. It doesn’t add up. Something is missing. His ears are ringing. Maybe he _did_ fall.

The old man pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He holds one out in front of him, an offering. “Care for a smoke? It might help with that headache.”

Will grits his teeth. “My mom’s a doctor. I don’t smoke.” His throat is raw and his mouth tastes wrong, his limbs feel heavy.

“Ah. Too bad.” He lights one up and takes a long drag, his eyes never leaving Will’s.

Will shifts slightly in his chair, unwilling to look away. They sit in silence for long minutes, the puffs of cigarette smoke dissipating in the cool air. Either they’ve come a _very_  long way, or this building is air-conditioned. Will can’t decide which possibility is less likely.

He tries to lift his arms, but they barely respond. Even turning his head to get a better look at his surroundings feels impossible; his head is just so _heavy_. The edges of his vision are still black, the colors are all wrong. It’s like looking at the world through some shitty Instagram filter.

It occurs to him, as he sits there unmoving, that this man probably drugged him. That chemical taste in his mouth, the blurring of the world. Will swallows and finally asks. “Who  _are_  you?”

The man sits down on a chair a few feet away. Out of reach. Pleasantly, with a smile that looks like he learned it by rote, he says, “I’m your grandfather.”

Will blinks at him. “No, you’re not.” For one thing, all of his grandparents are dead. For another, he’s seen pictures of his grandfathers: his mom’s dad, burly and bald and serious; his dad’s, with thin lips and a strong chin. Neither of them are this man.

The old man chuffs out a laugh and leans back, looking entirely too comfortable. His breathing sounds more like a hiss. Will _reaches_ , trying to get a read on him, but for once he’s met with resistance. The man is pushing _back._

“I don’t understand,” Will says finally.

“I don’t expect you to.” The man sighs, long and low. He comes toward Will’s chair, and Will feels, distantly, a pinch on his upper arm. “Sleep now,” the man says. “There are more trials to come.“

* * *

 

Will doesn’t know how much time passes. There are no windows anywhere. In this new room the lights are fluorescent, harsh. He’d forgotten what artificial light looked like. Too bright; his skin looks almost blue beneath them.

There are needles sticking into the veins in both of his elbows. Off to the side there’s a bag of what must be his own blood and a bag of some clear liquid. He’s restrained at the wrists and ankles. One of those blood-donation chairs, modified for kidnapping, apparently. When he moves his arms against the restraints, the needles pinch under his skin.

He closes his eyes and _reaches_ , into his own body, into his veins. Will can feel the spot where the needles enter, where his blood starts traveling up the tube. He concentrates and forms a clot just at the site of the puncture; he does the same in his other arm, blocking whatever’s in the other bag from entering.

When he opens his eyes again, the liquid in the tubes is stagnant.

From somewhere behind him, he hears a hacking cough. When the smoking man comes back into view, Will realizes that it was his best approximation of a laugh.

"That’s very good,” he says. “Very good.”

“Let me out.”

“Not yet. Come, you must have questions for me.” He pulls a metal folding chair over and sits on it, leaning back. Getting comfortable. “I know so much about you. About where you come from.”

And for a second, Will is tempted. To know the answer to the question that has plagued him for years, the truth of what he is.

What he is.

The lights and fog and swampy heat of the District; afternoons at the Smithsonian with his dad. The house in Virginia with the lake out back, the flies swarming in summer. Matt and Rebecca on the beach in San Diego, watching the waves crest on the horizon. His bedroom when he was a kid, with a chair next to the bed where his mom would sit and read to him. His mom: _heaven and earth_ , she’d said, and he knows — he _knows_ — she’s looking for him now.

Will says, “I know where I come from.”

But the man continues as though Will hadn’t spoken at all. “We let you grow up with your parents. We didn’t have to do that. It’s because I asked for that, for you.” He leans forward in his chair, trying to look earnest, sincere. He doesn’t sell it. “You’re my only grandchild. I thought it would be better for you to grow up like a normal child instead of in a laboratory, subject to constant experimentation.”

Will remembers something his mom had said, in passing — something about a daughter who had powers like his, who died—

The man sighs. “The girl, yes. We learned from our mistakes, you see? You should thank me.”

Will gapes at him and thinks hard, _stay the fuck out of my head_ , and out loud he hisses: “Never. Never.” He can still feel the old man reaching in around the edges of his mind. The way he does it is weird, awkward, like it’s something he learned instead of something he was born with. Not like Will. For him it’s as easy as breathing, and it gets easier every day.

The question rises again, unbidden: _What am I?_  He tries to quiet the thought, but it’s too late.

“You’re my grandson, of course,” the smoking man says smoothly. “And your father’s son, evidently. For better or worse.”

In his entire life, Will has never wanted to hurt someone the way he wants to hurt this man.

“Your father’s always been stubborn, too. He made you surprisingly hard to find. Especially after you and your mother ran from us, just when we needed you most. It took us more than a year to discover your location.”

He thinks of the men at the gate, back at the compound: that strange, almost-familiar feeling, and the carnage that followed. Payton was right to leave after all. Cannibals in the mountains were no match for the destructive power of Will Scully’s mere existence.

All those people dead, because of him.

“But you’re more than just family,” the man says, and Will’s body goes quiet. The smoking man is _reaching_  again and the memories come in flashes, distorted, almost too fast for Will to process: some impossible-looking ship, its pieces strewn across the desert. Men in suits, shaking hands; his parents in a dimly lit, cluttered office; a vial of black liquid. A dark-haired girl writing furiously in a notebook. Hospital corridors. A woman in a wheelchair, a young man’s body in a pool of blood. Gunshots.

A baby lying in a crib, making the stars move.

“You’re a weapon,” he says. “A guarantee, in case the colonists reneged on their promises.” The smoking man licks his lips. “Arguably, you’re the most powerful young man in the world. How does it feel?”

Will swallows, looking at the bag of blood. “So that’s what you’re doing? You’re making…a vaccine, or something? To give people?”

The man chuckles. “Oh, no.”

Whatever drug was dulling Will’s senses, it’s starting to wear off. The lines are sharper again. His hands clench on instinct. “Then _what_? You’re human. You’ll die with everyone else. What’s _in it_ for you?”

The smoking man smiles again. “I’ve thought about that question a great deal,” he says. He cocks his head. His breath hisses. “When I was a younger man, I thought it was about proving myself, about ambition. Like most young men, I was drawn to power, and I wanted it for myself.”

The man’s gaze grows distant. “But why settle for power among men, when I could be a god? I am the author of the end of humanity.”

His parents fought monsters for years, but this is the first time Will has come face to face with one. And he knows he’s outmatched. His voice is low: “Let me go.”

“You don’t need to worry, William.” Will winces at the sound of his own name. Everything from this man’s mouth is a curse. The old man gets up and unhooks the bag of Will’s blood. He says, “All of this is part of the plan.”


	26. Chapter 26

This ragged band hiding in the trees is all that’s left of the group that left the compound. Caleb is gone. So is the psychic. Scully wonders if the psychic had prophesied this, too: if she’d seen her own death in the cards, and gone anyway. There are no good choices.

The baby has survived. Grown men, armed and trained, died here and were buried, but the baby and his mother — Sara, she remembers — are still alive. Once she would have called that a miracle, but she knows better now.

As soon as she gets the chance, Scully pulls Payton aside. The girl looks so much older than Scully remembers, hollow-eyed and jumpy. “What happened here?” Scully asks, her voice low.

There’s a long pause. Payton stares straight ahead and bites her lip so hard it seems like it should bleed. “We were attacked.”

“By whom?”

Without a word, Payton stands up. Scully follows. They don’t go fast; the air feels thinner than it should. With every hour that passes she feels like she’s breathing faster and deeper, only to take in less and less air.

Payton leads her into a part of the forest where the foliage is thicker, lower to the ground. “The men we used to see up here,” she says, her voice low. “The fires at night. All the stories people told.” The mountain men, the bogeymen of the apocalypse. Scully’s only ever half-believed any of it.

Scully watches the younger woman intently. Payton’s dark eyes dart in every direction; her jaw quakes. Scully remembers her cool and confident, driving her beat-up truck through untold danger every day, and cannot imagine what has happened to her.

“There _are_ groups up here,” Payton continues. “They’re the fire-starters. The killers. But they aren’t men.”

She comes to a sudden stop. Before them is a long, low mound of dirt in the shadow of a fallen tree.

“Payton—”

The girl’s face is emotionless. She points toward one end of the mound. “That’s where its head is.”

After one long, cautious look back, Scully kneels beside the grave. She takes a pair of gloves out of her bag and pulls them on, then starts brushing the dirt from the body.

One square inch at a time, it comes into view. The skin has a bluish tint, the color of a days-old bruise.

Payton responds to her unasked question. “We buried it last night.”

When the body is visible from scalp to shoulders Scully sits back on her heels and stares.

From behind her, Payton says, emotionless, “Caroline said there were aliens. Is that what that is?”

Whatever it is, it’s not human. Its features are all wrong: the nose barely more than slits in the middle of its face, the eyes flat. Scully pushes one of the lids open to reveal an eye with no distinction between the sclera and the pupil: the entire thing is black. She sees her own reflection in it.

She leans over to examine the creature’s neck. Its veins and arteries are visible through the skin. It’s red-blooded, just like her.

Scully brushes away just enough dirt to see that the creature was wearing clothes — an Appalachian State T-shirt, covered in grime and fluid.

“It’s not human,” Payton says, her voice insistent.

“Not anymore,” Scully agrees. She pushes the dirt back into place and pulls the gloves off, leaving them there on the ground. “It attacked you?”

“A bunch of them. It happened a few days ago, too. That’s when — that’s when we lost people.” She looks down at her shoes. Her voice gets quiet. “They killed Caleb. And there were five other people they just…dragged away. I don’t know why, or what they were gonna do to them. We — I couldn’t stop them.” When she finally meets Scully’s eyes, her expression is open, pleading. “I tried. But I was supposed to protect Sara and the baby, and—”

“And you did,” Scully says firmly.

This sits uneasily with Payton. “I guess,” she says.

“The creatures who attacked you the first time — when people were killed. Did they look like this, too?”

Payton braces herself: her spine stiffens, her jaw juts out. She comes back over and looks down at the creature without blanching. After a moment, she says, “No. Not exactly.”

Scully looks at her, waiting. Payton adds, “The first group came at night, so I didn’t get a good look at them. But this thing—,” she shudders, “I would never mistake it for human. That first night some of them looked human, or close enough. And some of them — it was like they got stuck halfway. Like they were trying to transform but didn’t quite make it.” She falls silent.

“Thank you for showing me this,” Scully says.

She turns to head back to camp, but she doesn’t hear Payton’s footsteps joining her.

“Dr. Scully.” Payton’s voice is hesitant. “Will isn’t with you.”

Scully stills. “No.”

“When I saw you coming, I thought. I hoped maybe he would be.”

She doesn’t look back. When she responds it’s more for herself than anyone else. “I hoped so too.”

* * *

Back at the camp Mulder’s with Matt. The two of them are sitting just a foot from each other, both staring off at the horizon. Scully joins them, cross-legged on the dirt. She addresses her nephew. “Were you there when the creatures attacked?”

Mulder perks up at the word creatures, but he doesn’t interrupt.

Slowly, Matt nods. “They’re not human, are they.”

Scully glances at Mulder. “No, I don’t think so.” She hesitates, then adds, “But I think they used to be. I think — I think they’re hybrids.”

Matt looks down, bites his lip. To the dirt he asks, “Is that what Will is? He showed me that thing with his blood, with the dirt, he—”

“It worked?” Despite everything, she can’t quite keep the excitement from her voice.

“Yeah. I mean, I think so. He was able to…to chase all the black stuff out.”

There are so many questions swimming in her head and she wants all of the answers at once: how long did it take, what did it look like, what was left after, _what’s going to happen to my son_ , but there is only one question she asks out loud. “Matt,” she says. “Are you sure you don’t remember what happened?”

He shakes his head. “I told you, it’s like…it’s like someone reached into my head and just erased it. I remember waking up one morning, and Will was still there, and I remember coming here and finding everyone. But everything in between is just…” He nearly growls in frustration. “It’s gone.”

She swallows her disappointment. She’s getting used to the taste.

And then Matt hands her a vial. “It’s Will’s,” he says. “When we left the compound, I grabbed it.”

Scully turns the vial in her hand, watching the liquid move. It’s spent the last week in entirely improper storage conditions, but there’s no reason for her to expect his blood to adhere to the strictures of science.

She doesn’t let herself think about it. With a pocketknife she slices across her own hand, ignoring Mulder’s sharp inhale. Her blood puddles in the dirt. A foot away she unscrews the cap on the vial and releases just a drop of Will’s blood onto the ground.

The three of them watch. In a matter of moments Scully’s blood is absorbed into the dirt. But Will’s beads up and starts to spread. “Is this what happened last time?” she asks.

“In the beginning, yeah. But then…Will did something to it, and all of this black stuff came oozing out.”

As he speaks, the beads start to move deeper into the soil. Black sludge rises to the surface, forming a thin layer over the dirt. Scully swallows hard. “Like that?” she asks.

Matt stares. “Yeah. Like that.”

* * *

“Skinner said the same thing,” Mulder murmurs. “He said he used Will’s blood to disinfect the wound on his leg. I didn’t believe him.”

The silence of the forest at night still unsettles her, after all this time. No owls, no rodents rustling to hide their conversation.

Her head on his chest. “They’ve seen several stages of these hybrids in the forest. I think they’re using them to test — to determine whether or not the Earth is ready for alien habitation.”

He strokes her hair. She can feel the tension in his fingers. “Is it?”

“Well, we’re still breathing,” she points out. “But the creature I saw in the woods was more alien than human.” She hesitates. “Sometimes I wonder.”

His hand settles on her back. “What?”

“If this is my fault. If I — I wanted a child so badly. And I never even questioned how—”

“Why would you?”

“I still don’t know what they did to me. When I was taken, when I was treated…”

“He’s our _son_ ,” Mulder says. “Whatever else he is, or whatever role any of us have to play.”

Behind them, leaves crunch. The noise is sharp against the quiet. Scully sits up to see Matt in silhouette against the stars.

“Aunt Dana,” he says. “Do you believe in dreams?”

Mulder sits up too. She looks to him before she answers. “Sometimes.”

Matt sits cross-legged a few feet from them. “I don’t,” he clarifies. “But this one was…weirder than usual.” He clears his throat like he’s about to give a speech, then stops. “Do you still have that notebook?”

She pulls it out of her bag and opens it to the first clean page, then hands it over with some reluctance. There have been so few constants in her new life.

With Scully’s pen and notebook in hand, Matt starts to draw. Scully watches him. His strokes are confident and strong. She remembers him drawing as a kid — It used to make Bill crazy, his son with the head in the clouds, and Scully, who’d devoted her life to a man whose head was well outside the stratosphere, felt unqualified to comment. But it’s obvious from his motions now that he never stopped.

After a few minutes he pauses, the nib of the pen just brushing the paper. He makes a few more quick dashes, then hands the notebook back.

A glass tower, rising up from barren ground. Death cuts a wide swath around the building, and the trees and plants start full-grown and stark on the perimeter, as though someone had burned a precise ring around the building. Mulder exhales. His hand finds hers and grabs it. She gives him a curious glance.

“I don’t believe in dreams,” Matt says, and Scully and Mulder turn as one to look at him again. “But that’s where I lost Will.”


	27. Chapter 27

He has Matt's drawing folded up in his pocket like a talisman. Every time his fingers brush against it he thinks of the year he spent in that tower, thinks of his son there now.

Next to him Scully stalks silently up the hillside. Out of the corner of his eye she could be twenty-eight again, trudging through the thick northwestern woods, her skepticism impenetrable. He reaches out and takes her hand.

She gives him a swift glance, her eyes as sharp as ever. She doesn't let go.

They are both undernourished and dehydrated, careful as they've been to conserve their limited resources; still they move easily through the forest, fueled by a force more potent than food and water.

"Are you sure this is the right way?" she asks, staring up at the ever-increasing incline.

Mulder chuffs. "Have I ever been?"

Scully grins at him, and for a moment it's possible to forget what's brought them here — and here they are, back where it started.

Her voice on his answering machine; a chase through the mountains, in the darkness. Whatever they did to her during those long months she was missing. Whatever it did to their son. He keeps expecting to come across the skeleton of the tramway, closed down long before the world ended, or the burnt-out hulks of cars that were surely cleared away hours after all of those abductees were massacred. How stupidly luck he'd been that Scully wasn't among them.

He fucking hates this place. His hand tightens around hers.

"Scully," he says.

"Yeah?"

"If we don't die, let's get the fuck out of Virginia."

She doesn't laugh. She looks up into the canopy, the branches and leaves twining overhead. "This isn't a place I ever wanted to come back to," she admits. The mountains that took her; the mountains that have taken their son.

He quickens his pace. He got Scully back. He'll get William back, too.

* * *

In the late afternoon the ground starts to level off. They haven't spoken in hours, and Mulder finds himself fighting for every breath the higher up they go. _Getting old_ , he tells himself, but he wasn't this old last week. There's a dank, metallic smell in the air that fills his mouth and nostrils.

The trees start to change. Strange, misshapen leaves grow in clusters. The bark looks slick. He doesn't touch it. That's a lesson he's finally learned.

Beside him Scully murmurs, "Ground zero," and he is certain she's right.

After another ten minutes they reach the end of the forest. Just like in Matt's picture and Mulder's memory, the forest is thick and then suddenly stops, revealing acres of dead earth, the tower in the center. He can't see anyone stationed outside or on the perimeter, and the building is dark inside.

Scully stares up at it. "This is where you were?" she asks, disbelief clouding her voice.

He swallows. "It feels like a dream."

"Where did it come from? Who built this? _When_?"

"Hey, I don't know any more than you do."

With a level gaze, she turns on him. "I've known you a long time. I find it hard to believe that you accepted the existence of a secret military base in the middle of nowhere without asking any questions."

It's hard for him too, to think about the time he spent there. Mulder had tallied the days like a prisoner, Sharpie on the wall, but his memory is indistinct, a blur of questions unanswered and unasked. It had just been easier to accept it. To watch the world end from the inside.

"There were maybe a hundred, a hundred-fifty people here," he says. He can feel Scully's eyes on him. "I spent most of my time with Frohike and some other techie guys. Most of the tech was outdated or broken; we tinkered, mostly. Trying to find a way to communicate, to track the weather or the spread of infection…"

Her voice is flat. "And what about Skinner?"

"Skinner knew about the base before. It's where he was going to take you and Will back when—" Mulder stops mid-sentence. God, what if they'd gone? If it hadn't snowed, if they hadn't gotten trapped in the lake house all winter, Will would have ended up here almost two years ago. Scully's jaw tightens. When he speaks again, he's trying to convince himself as much as her. "They were working on a vaccine."

"I'm sure," she says. "That's why they sent a group of armed men to destroy my entire town and kidnap our son. That's why they're _threatening you over the radio_. Because they're working on a vaccine."

Mulder winces. "When you put it like that…"

Scully closes her eyes and inhales deeply, then takes another step toward the edge of the clearing. "He's here. I know he is."

"Then let's go."

* * *

The tower is not only unguarded, it seems to be completely empty. Mulder should take that for the warning it is, but he's never been a cautious man.

Their footsteps echo down the long hallways. Behind every door is more nothing. The place has been cleared out: the equipment Mulder remembers is gone, and there are no signs of life anywhere.

"How big is this place?"

"Eight floors above ground, at least three subbasements," Mulder says.

Scully glances out the window. "We have an hour before the sun goes down. We have to split up."

"Haven't you ever seen a horror movie, Scully?"

She narrows her eyes at him. He shrugs.

"If you find him, yell," she says. The confidence in her voice is all bluster, but he loves her for trying. "I'll find you."

 _You always do_ , he wants to say. Instead he sticks his gun in his back pocket and grabs her hand, pulling her toward him. He kisses her swiftly, before she can protest. He presses his forehead to hers. "Don't die," he instructs. His voice comes out shaky.

"I haven't yet."

Mulder watches her as she jogs up the stairs, gun in her hand. As soon as she disappears around a corner, he turns the other direction.

The first subbasement has well windows that let in just enough light to see by, but the others won't. Mulder opens the first door and starts digging through drawers until he finds a flashlight. He flicks the switch. It's dim, but it'll have to work.

"Come on," he mutters, moving down the hall. It's more of the same, room after room, until he comes to what used to be the medical ward.

As soon as he opens the door, Mulder is hit with a smell that makes him gag, and he clutches his stomach, trying not to throw up.

Whatever it used to be, now it's a morgue. Or a tomb.

The floor is littered with bodies in various stages of decay. Dozens of them, infected with the same rot that took Mulder's arm. Eyes watering, he gives them a once-over with the flashlight. He is pretty sure none of them are Frohike; he's certain none of them are Will. At least now he knows where everyone else went.

The door slams shut on his way back out but the stench follows him. There's no way that kind of mass infection could be an accident, not with the protocols they had in place. Someone murdered those people.

He's halfway down the next flight of stairs when he's suddenly thrown against the wall. Something crunches when he hits the floor. He grabs for his gun, but whoever knocked into him gets it first.

Mulder waits for the world to stop spinning. He opens his eyes to see his own gun pointed at him. And Skinner's the one holding it.

"What the fuck," Mulder says, staring up at him.

Skinner is red-faced and breathing hard. "Did you find him?"

"Who?"

" _William_."

Mulder shoves Skinner off of him and staggers to his feet. "You're looking for him?"

Skinner doesn't answer his question. "The Smoking Man. He's still alive, he brought William here."

" _You_ were going to bring William here. You told me you wanted to bring him to the base."

The older man doesn't say a word in response. He just holds the gun steady.

Mulder takes a step towards him. His voice is low. "Were you fucking _working_ for them?"

Skinner narrows his eyes and opens his mouth as though he's going to protest — and then he stops, and sighs. He finally lowers Mulder's weapon, though he doesn't put it away. And he says, quietly, "I believed I could stop them."

Mulder feels something inside himself splinter and break. "This whole time."

"It's more complicated than that—"

"I've always defended you!"

"I didn't—" The older man's fists clench. He looks away. "I'm not one of them. I've done _everything_ I can to protect your son. Your — the Cancer Man, he wants William so he can finally put an end to everything. I want him to save us."

"And what does that mean?"

"It means." Skinner glances up at the ceiling, like he might find a better answer written there. "You don't have to believe me, Mulder, but I'm telling you the truth. Yes, I knew. I knew when Scully was abducted. I knew about her daughter. And I knew enough of what the Consortium was planning to know that her son would have a role to play in the endgame. I just didn't know what."

Mulder looks at him. "Do you know now?"

Skinner won't meet his eyes.

His chest aches. The air is strangling him. Somewhere in this building Scully is searching for their son. Scully, who believed once in happy endings. It's so easy to picture her sitting out on the dock, her toes dangling in the water, watching Will swim back to shore. The sunlight fading. No one ever said happy endings were permanent.

He can barely get the words out. "Hasn't she sacrificed enough?"

"I know." For just a moment, Skinner has the grace to look ashamed. "You know I don't want to hurt her. Or William."

The words evaporate in the air between them.

Finally Mulder says, "If I had my gun, I'd shoot you."

The look Skinner gives him is grim. "Yeah. That's why I took your gun."

A gunshot breaks the silence, and for a second Mulder thinks it's Skinner who's fired, but he looks just as shocked. Skinner opens his mouth, but he's cut off by the sound of glass breaking, and then a scream from somewhere above them in the stairwell.

And then Scully's voice, unmistakable, calling Mulder's name.


	28. Chapter 28

Everything turns to chaos all at once.

From somewhere outside the room he hears a scream. And then — he can’t be wrong, he _can’t_ — he hears his mom’s voice, then several sets of footsteps racing down the hall.

Doors slam in the corridor, and the sounds keep coming closer. Will doesn’t know if anyone can hear him but he tries to broadcast it anyway: _I’m here, come find me_ , and he barely has time to breathe again before someone shoves open his door.

It’s Skinner. Somewhere in the back of his head he can hear his mom insisting, _Mr. Skinner_ , but he ignores it.

“Thank God,” the older man exhales. He kicks the door shut behind him and starts working at the restraints on the chair.

“There’s a key somewhere,” Will says.

Skinner grunts. He pulls a Swiss army knife out of his pocket and starts digging at the lock. If the FBI still existed, this alone would convince Will to join up. Seems like you pick up all kinds of useful skills.

When Skinner finally gets the restraints off, Will rubs at his wrists. They’re red and tender where metal rubbed against his bones.

Skinner looks from Will to the door and back again. The shouts outside keep getting louder. “Take this,” Skinner says. He shoves a gun into Will’s hands.

“Wait, what—”

“It’s your dad’s,” he says impatiently. Will doesn’t ask why Skinner has his dad’s gun. “Do you know how to use it?”

Wordless, Will nods.

“Good. We need to get your parents and get out.” He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Shoot anyone else you see.”

Will follows him out into the hall on unsteady legs. He has no idea how long he’s been here or how long he was in that chair, but it must’ve been a couple days, at least. Skinner takes off running and Will makes for the stairwell a few doors down.

He shoulders the door open, letting it slam behind him. Feeling the strength coming back to his legs, Will takes the stairs two at a time, glancing out the window as he goes. Three stories up, maybe four. Too high to jump, no matter what happens.

Outside the sky is dark with a hint of orange, like the world is hanging on the edge of a storm. Will inhales deeply, letting the air fill his lungs all the way down. With every step he feels better, stronger.

He jumps down to the next landing and comes to a dead stop.

The man who took him is standing a half-flight down the stairs, a gun in his wrinkled hands. He’s pointing it around the next corner. At Will’s dad.

It takes a second for him to remember to breathe.

His dad is _actually alive_. It seems impossible, after everything that’s happened, but here — here he is. Unarmed with his back against the wall, in jeans and a leather jacket with one arm pinned back. He looks older and smaller than Will remembered.

“Hey!” Will shouts down at them. His dad’s eyes flick up to him a split-second later, and there’s too much there for Will to process. It all washes over him at once: the relief, the surprise, the fear.

Mostly fear.

The old man doesn’t look at all surprised to see Will standing there. “There you are,” he says, impatient, like Will was late for an appointment. His voice is grating. He turns back to Will’s dad. “He’s a handsome young man. He looks so much like you did at his age.”

Will’s gaze meets his dad’s. He can’t stand the thought of this creepy old guy having known his family for so long. He can’t stand the idea that this man knows things about Will’s father that Will can never know.

“Don’t,” Will says, and he’s not even sure what he’s asking. He just wants all of this to stop. He wants the man to go away. He wants his old life back, and the future he was supposed to have, even though he knows he can’t have any of that ever again.

“If I kill him, he’ll be spared the worst,” the man says, nodding his head toward Will’s dad. “I killed my other son. Mercy killings, both.”

“You’re _not_ going to kill him.”

The smoking man laughs and it turns into a cough, wracking and deep. For the first time Will notices how sick they both look. The yellow tinge to his father’s eyes, his sunken cheeks. He remembers looking at pictures in news stories, victims of famine and disease; it’s what both of them look like now. Will’s dad grimaces and leans against the wall; Will wonders if he can even support his own weight.

He whispers, “What’s happening?”

“Our destiny,” the man says. He smiles. “The world I made. It’s rejecting us.”

“We’ll stop it,” Will says. But as he watches, his dad slumps all the way to the ground. He remembers when he thought his dad was invincible. When he was the hero of every story. _You’re supposed to save us_ , Will thinks. _Who’s going to save us?_

“You have days, not weeks,” the smoking man says. “They’re coming. You _can’t_ stop it.”

Days. For his parents, who’ve spent their whole lives fighting for everyone else, for Matt who won’t ever see the ocean again, for Payton, who only kissed him once. _Days_ , he thinks, his head spinning. It’s not enough time. There is never enough time.

The man smirks.

Will steadies himself. He raises his father’s gun in front of him, pointing the barrel at the old man. “I can stop _you_.”

“It won’t help.”

Will considers this. “I don’t care.”

He can feel the power in his hands and arms. With every breath of poisoned air his dad and the smoking man grow weaker, and Will — Will is stronger than he has ever been. Wide stance, his shoulder back. Will knows a lot of things. He releases the safety. The _click_ echoes through the room.

The old man inhales sharply just once, but it’s enough for Will to know that it worked. That he’s afraid. _You should be_ , Will thinks.

Will takes a half-step forward. The smoking man takes a half-step back. His voice still conversational, he says, “Have you ever killed a man, William?”

Calm settles over him. His finger on the trigger. He remembers his father’s hands over his, showing him. _I hope you never have to use this_ , he’d said. They’d been standing in the snow-covered backyard. Crystals of their breath in the air. _But you need to know_.

“It changes you in ways you can’t foresee,” the old man says. “Ways you can’t take back.”

One moment of perfect clarity. His fingers and toes, his veins, every neuron, every cell. Will says, “I’m changing all the time.”

* * *

Will climbs over the smoking man’s corpse to get his dad, half-pulling him down the stairs and out the door. They lope awkwardly out of the building, into the world again. The stifling heat has been replaced with a sharp, cold wind. As soon as they reach the edge of the clearing his dad sinks to the ground, leaning against a tree trunk.

“Where’s Mom?” Will asks.

His dad shakes his head, but at that moment Will’s mom comes racing out the door.

“Will!” she calls, and she doesn’t stop running until she’s pulled him into her arms. She goes to Will’s dad next, kneeling next to him, checking for injuries. “We heard a gunshot, I thought—” She’s gulping down air, and Will wants to tell her _don’t do that, it’s not safe_ , but what’s safe anymore? “You’re both fine. You’re both fine?”

“We’re fine,” Will’s dad confirms.

“Then who—”

Will and his dad don’t look at each other, and they don’t say anything.

Skinner jogs up and looks to Will’s mom. “What do you want to do?”

“There’s a lab,” she says. “There’s equipment I could use. There are blood samples, there are—”

“There are bodies,” Will’s dad says, still staring back at the building. “Dozens of them. Infected.”

They sit with that. Skinner’s mouth is set in a thin line. “Their blood is toxic. We can’t move the bodies. We can’t risk someone else coming across them and spreading the infection.” He sighs. “Burn it down.”

For the first time Will really notices his surroundings. When he got here the trees were lush, green. Now they’re wilting, the leaves shriveling up, the bark yellowing. And there’s a hum in the air where it was dead silent before, but it’s not the familiar summer songs of grasshoppers or cicadas: it’s too high-pitched, too steady, an almost mechanical whine. He looks up into the treetops to see the insects hovering overhead.

His mom’s gaze follows his. “They’re adapting.”

“We don’t have much time.” Skinner digs a lighter out of his bag and tosses it to Will’s mom. “The generator.”

She heads back toward the building. Will watches from a distance, waiting for the flames.

And he feels Skinner’s hand, heavy on his shoulder. He’s grown tall enough now that he’s nearly eye-to-eye with the older man, but he straightens his back anyway. “Let’s take a walk,” Skinner says, and Will doesn’t have to read his mind to know exactly what he’s going to say.


	29. Chapter 29

A long time ago, when Matt was ten or eleven, Will came out to San Diego. At the zoo, Matt’s parents said he and Will could walk around by themselves and meet back up for lunch. Matt was obviously in charge. Back then, the two years between them gave him undeniable authority. It was beautiful outside, and they watched a lion snatch a wayward pigeon from the air, and Matt had his notebook and he was drawing a picture of the lesser kudu with the pencils he got for Christmas—

And then he looked up, and Will was gone. Matt panicked. He ran through the whole Africa section, shouting his cousin’s name, but Will was _nowhere_. Somehow in just a few seconds he’d disappeared completely. Matt didn’t know what happened to kids who lost their younger cousins — did you go to juvie for that? — but it couldn’t be anything good. And it was a _zoo_. What if he fell into the bear exhibit?

Of course Will turned up just a few minutes later. He’d found one of those penny-squishing machines and gotten distracted trying to figure out how it worked. Luckily Matt found him before his parents did. No one else ever even knew what happened. No one else ever knew how close Matt came to losing him; how close Will came to getting lost.

* * *

Sitting around the ashes of someone else’s campfire, talking shit, it’s easy for Matt to pretend that things are normal. Except that every breath hurts his lungs, and the temperature’s fallen fifty degrees since yesterday — the forest went from unbearably hot to just above freezing — and the air is thick with smoke from the destruction of the tower. High above them, little fires spark in piles of brush. Their distant light looks like fireflies if he squints hard enough.

Will’s poking at the logs with a stick. Matt wonders who built the fire, and what happened to them.

“It’s cold,” Matt says. “It’s still August, right?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” Matt insists. He remembers the months he spent traveling and how carefully he’d counted the days. At one point he’d had what he’s pretty sure was pneumonia, and even through fever and delirium and a hacking, bloody cough, he had marked the sunsets. “You start losing track of the days and you lose track of everything.”

Suddenly one of the logs collapses into itself. Bugs scuttle out onto the ground. Matt leans over to look at them, then pulls back, repulsed. “What _are_ those?”

Will reaches down like he’s going to pick one up. Matt slaps his arm away. “Don’t touch them!”

His cousin gives him a strange, curious look, the tilt of his head almost avian. “They can’t hurt me,” he says slowly, like it’s obvious. Will sets his hand on the ground. One of the bugs crawls up his arm, settling on his shoulder. Matt shudders. Will doesn’t respond at all.

The ash is black and almost shiny against the forest floor. It reminds him of that black ooze Will had forced out of the dirt back at the compound. “What happened to you up there?” Matt asks.

He’s not sure he really wants to know, and Will doesn’t say anything.

Matt’s dad used to say all kinds of stuff about Aunt Dana and her family. It wasn’t _mean_ , exactly, just — it was obvious that he didn’t really understand her or any of the things she did. Once on Thanksgiving while Will was talking about something, Matt’s dad muttered, “Spooky, just like his dad.” Matt’s mom kicked him under the table and gave everybody else a forced smile, which was more or less how those dinners always went.

Afterwards he’d tried to figure out what his dad meant. _Spooky_. Will wasn’t a ghost or a werewolf. He didn’t watch too many scary movies or sneak around in dark corners or wear really gory masks on Halloween.

Now, in the dark around the skeleton of a fire, Will’s eyes shining, Matt sees it.

The bug sits on Will’s shoulder. Matt feels like it’s staring at him, too. Finally Will changes the subject. “It’s weird, seeing my dad again. I’m taller than him.”

Matt nods. He’d been taller than his dad, too.

“I don’t know what to say to him.”

He thinks of his own father thousands of miles away, almost certainly dead, but the silence isn’t any deeper now than it ever was. Matt can’t remember the last real conversation he had with his dad. He says, “I never did either.”

“What do you think—” Will starts, then pauses. “Do you ever think about, like, what they would’ve wanted? What they thought we’d be?” The unspoken is obvious: _if the world hadn’t ended_. If there had been a future to imagine.

“My dad wanted me to join the Navy. You know. Be a man.” He flexes his arm. It’s a joke now. Whatever muscle tone he’d had two years ago is long gone. His body cannibalized its own excess months ago.

Will smirks. “Too bad you’re so shit at following orders.”

He grins. “Yeah. Too bad.” He looks at Will. “What about you?”

Will starts digging in the dirt with the stick; Matt wonders what he’s trying to unearth. Finally he says, “I have no idea. Like, we never even talked about it. Sometimes I wonder if…” He swallows. The muscles in his jaw tense. “If they always knew what was going to happen.”

Will’s blood in the dirt, those men chasing him, whatever happened to him up in that tower. Matt asks quietly, “What’s going to happen?”

“I just keep thinking about that dream I used to have.” Will’s voice is strained. “When I was a kid.”

Matt remembers, too. _At the end of the dream I died._

He asks, “Do you really think you can save the world?”

Will shrugs. “Who else is gonna do it?”

They stay up together, even though there isn’t much to say. Matt looks up. The stars are still the same, at least. Thousands of years ago, before atlases and Google Maps, people could still find their way home. It settles him.

As long as they can see the stars, they won’t get lost.


	30. 26. scully

For the better part of the night Scully lies awake, listening to the soft murmur of voices from the makeshift campsite. Will and Matt are huddled together, whispering around a long-dormant fire. Sara’s baby cries every now and then, and the girl wakes up to comfort him. For once all of the sounds around her are soft, familiar, _human_ , but Scully is not comforted.

Will’s blood, the baby’s, her own. The facility they burned to ashes. What truths could she have uncovered there? What mysteries could she have solved?

Will’s blood, dislodging the pathogen; Will’s body, untroubled by the changes that are killing everyone else. Every mother believes her child is special, but Scully knows she’s right.

She thinks about the pet rabbit she’d had as a little girl, remembers her own small hands touching the creature’s insides, trying to figure out what made it work. At five years old she’d been heartless. All children are sociopaths, she supposes, but she — she was different.

What if her heart only beats science? Her only son. _What would you sacrifice?_

On the ground beside her Mulder jolts awake. He blinks up at her. “Did you say something?”

Jesus. How loud was she thinking? “Not out loud.”

He just looks at her expectantly. It’s something he’s always been good at: knowing when she needs to talk, knowing when she needs not to.

“William,” she says. She wraps her arms around her knees.

Mulder breaks eye contact. Whatever Skinner told him back at the base, he’s been quiet ever since. She won’t ask him to say it out loud.

“I hate the idea that we’ve been pawns the whole time,” she says, staring straight ahead. “That the game was fixed. That we just played the roles we were assigned.”

On Will’s first day of school, he’d held her hand tight in his all the way to his classroom, but he never cried. Will building rockets in the backyard, shooting hoops with Mulder in the driveway, reciting whole chapters of _The Hobbit_ from memory. Floating on his back out on the lake, the freckles on his nose darkening.

If he was given to her just so they could take him away.

“Do you still think it was worth it?” he asks, his voice hoarse. The long years, the horror and the fear and the uncertainty. And Mulder, always. Always.

She lies down next to him, pulling his arm around her waist, and breathes the poisoned air. She has never felt so finite.

—

As soon as the sun comes up Scully goes looking for the next piece of the puzzle.

“You want his _blood_?” Sara whispers, like it’s a secret she needs to keep from the rest of the camp.

Scully knows what she’s asking; she wouldn’t do it if there were any other choice. Already she’s tried her own blood and Skinner’s, hoping their immunity to the initial disease might extend to whatever infects the earth now, but their blood did nothing at all to dislodge the pathogen. This baby is it: her last idea, their last hope.

“You can see it, can’t you?” Scully prods gently. “How strong he is.”

Sara looks down at the baby in her arms. The young woman looks like the rest of them — thin and worn ragged, with a sick pallor to her skin. In her gaunt face her eyes are enormous. But the baby is as robust as you could hope for, chubby and bright-eyed and peaceful, staring up at them.

Sara asks, “Is something wrong with him?”

“No,” Scully rushes to assure her, “no, but I think he might—” She flounders for a moment. “Since he was conceived after the attacks, I believe he has a resistance to the pathogen.”

“That’s a good thing, right? That means he’ll be okay?”

Scully doesn’t want to lie, so she ignores the question. “If I’m right, the antibodies in his blood could help us create a treatment, to stop other people from getting sick. And if I’m wrong, the blood draw isn’t going to hurt him.”

Biting her lip, Sara agrees. “That needle is clean, right? And not too big?”

When Scully pricks the boy’s heel, he doesn’t cry at all — just regards her seriously, his big eyes laser focused on her. Once she’s filled just half of a vial she releases him, carefully bandaging over the tiny wound.

With Sara still watching, Scully walks back a few hundred yards to where Will and Mulder are waiting for her. Side by side, their likeness is almost painful. Same hair, same nose, same easy posture. Something flickers in her vision; she can almost see what they would look like in twenty years, or thirty, standing just like that.

All the times she and Mulder talked about the multiverse. Somewhere there’s a universe where she and Mulder live to be ninety years old, where they watch their son grow up and get married and have strange, beautiful children of his own. But she doesn’t think it’s this universe.

They’ve set up another container of dirt, and Scully lets a few drops of blood fall from the vial.

They watch it work just as she’d predicted. After a minute, Will says, “The baby’s a hybrid too?”

Remembering the body Payton had showed her in the woods, Scully shakes her head firmly. “He’s not a hybrid. He’s like you.” Fully human. Fully something else.

Her son doesn’t lift his eyes from the growing pool of black sludge. “So I’m not the only one. You could use his blood to make medicine. Like with Dad, or Skinner.”

“If it’s possible on a broader scale at all, then yes. I think it would work almost like yours. His blood isn’t as powerful, and he can’t direct it the way you can. At least not yet.”

Will shuffles his shoe in the dirt. “But even if something happens to me, you’ll still be able to help people. To…to fight it.”

She wants to say _nothing’s going to happen to you_. She wants to say, _everything is going to be okay_. But in the moment she finds that she can’t lie anymore. “Yes,” she says finally. “That’s what it means.”

* * *

Early in the afternoon they ration out tiny portions of food and water. Joanne stays back, leaning against a tree. She hasn’t moved from that spot all day. Scully brings over a water bottle and half a granola bar, but the woman grimaces and turns her face away.

“You need to eat something,” Scully says.

Joanne shakes her head. “It just comes back up.”

Scully crouches next to her. Glassy eyes, pale skin, trembling hands: she looks like the rest of them, but worse.

“Give it to my daughter,” Joanne whispers. “She needs it.”

Across the campsite Sara is looking their way, her brow creased. Scully thinks of her own mother. What she would have given to save her. More harshly than she’d intended, she says, “She doesn’t want you to starve for her. Take it.”

The woman’s eyes are defiant, but the rest of her is too exhausted to fight. She takes the granola bar and takes one slow, tiny bite.

Sara starts walking toward them, baby in tow. “Dr. Scully?” she asks, hesitant. “Did you — what did you find? With my son?”

“I think I was right,” Scully says, but for the first time that doesn’t feel like a victory.

But Sara turns her chin up and nods. “What does that mean?”

“It means…it means that if I could get access to an equipped laboratory, he might be able to help us create medicine for everyone who’s getting sick.” She swallows. “But I’m not sure anywhere like that still exists.”

Behind them Skinner coughs into his sleeve. Scully flinches at the sound. She’s been avoiding him. She turns just slightly to let him in.

“I am,” Skinner says, addressing Sara more than her. Scully’s happy enough to avoid the eye contact. “My base would have had the capacity to synthesize a treatment and distribute it.”

“Your base is gone,” Scully says flatly. “On your command.”

Skinner chews on his lip. “There are other facilities like it,” he says, and she can’t tell if he’s bluffing. “There’s one on an island just off the coast, maybe a week’s walk from here.”

Even if it’s true, it sounds ridiculous. A week’s walk? Scully fully expects that in a week they’ll all be dead. And the idea of any of them — except Will — walking for a week is laughable. They’re barely able to walk around their campsite.

But Sara brightens visibly. She looks up at him with something like awe, and Scully remembers that Skinner is still an imposing man, with some core of vitality that hasn’t been diminished by the pathogen that’s slowly killing him.

To Scully, Sara says, “Are you saying my son could save everyone?” Her gaze drifts to the spot where her mother is sitting, now asleep against the tree again. “Could he save my mom?”

Scully doesn’t know what to say. Skinner answers for her. “Dr. Scully thinks so.”

She glares at him, but Sara doesn’t notice. She gives a curt nod and hikes her baby up on her hip. She says, “Then when do we leave?”


	31. 27. will

They start packing up their few belongings, the little food and water they have left. It isn’t a week’s worth, not even close, but they’ll find what they need along the way or die trying. Above them the sun moves inexorably toward the horizon, a clock they can’t turn back.

Will is organizing his mom’s remaining medical supplies when she says, out of nowhere: “We talked about giving you up.”

“Scully—” his dad says. A warning.

“He should know,” she says. “What we did. What we are.”

She’s sitting on the ground a couple feet away from him. Will looks at her, trying to keep his own voice as neutral as possible. “Why?”

“We knew you were different. We thought — we thought it would keep you safe. If you had a new name and a new family, somewhere thousands of miles away, they would never find you.”

“It wouldn’t have worked.” If he’d grown up with some other family, a family who lived in the light, who didn’t know that sometimes the monsters under the bed are real. There’s no way he would have made it this long.

Her voice is rough. “I would have regretted it every day of my life.”

Will looks away, blinking hard. “Mom, if you’d known. Would you still—”

“ _Always_ ,” she says. “Will. I love you. I’m so proud of you. No matter what. Don’t ever forget that.”

He starts to say _I won’t_ , but his throat won’t cooperate, and anyway, that’s when the screaming starts.

Will immediately jumps to his feet. The others move, too, though they’re slower than him. They stand up one by one.

The screams become louder. Not quite animal, not quite human. They make Will’s entire body go cold.

“What the fuck _is_ that,” Payton whispers, but no one turns to look at her.

Will doesn’t actually make a decision. He just starts walking because it seems like the only thing to do. His mom joins him, grabbing her gun. She’s suddenly steel again, the softness in her eyes evaporated. “Let’s go,” she says. They don’t wait for anyone else to decide to be brave. They’re the only ones here who are well enough to help.

They move quietly through the forest, stepping over dead branches. The screams start again and Will listens close. “This way,” he mutters, and his mom follows him.

This time the screaming doesn’t stop. As they get closer Will covers his ears, but it doesn’t do much to block out the sound. It’s piercing, unnatural.

“Will,” his mom says. “Look.”

Between the trees he sees them: a pack of something — some kind of rodent, too big to be a rat or even an opossum — swarming around and over each other. There must be a dozen of them, at least.

He doesn’t want to do anything that will attract their attention. He whispers, “Is that what’s making the noise?”

Slowly, she shakes her head.

Will takes another step forward, then stops. “Oh my God,” he says, the words slipping out without his permission.

Beneath the writhing mass of creatures there’s a body. And that’s where the screams are coming from.

Now that he knows what to look for Will catches glimpses. The body isn’t — wasn’t? — entirely human, he’s sure of that.

“A hybrid,” his mom hisses, “oh my _God_ —”

Neither of them say it out loud, but he hears it anyway: _They’re eating it alive._

Then the screaming stops, and the silence is even worse.

In the same moment, they both raise their weapons. They take aim.

“Three,” his mom breathes.

They shoot at the same moment. A bullet hits one of the creatures, but the sudden sound scatters the rest.

Will shoots again and again, the gunshots echoing in his head. Next to him his mom does the same thing, until moments later their carcasses litter the ground.

“Stay here,” Will says. “I’ll go look.”

The creature they were attacking is still alive. Will can see its chest rising and falling, its hands spasming; he can hear its labored, liquid breaths. Will doesn’t know if it could ever talk, but he knows why it stopped screaming: its vocal cords were ripped out.

Without hesitation, Will shoots it in the head. Its frantic motion stills.

His mom was right. It’s not human. But it’s not far off, either; it’s not like what she and Payton saw back near the camp. It’s more human than not. _It’s like you_ , his traitorous brain tells him.

As he stands over the corpse, he feels a sharp, sudden pinch on his calf. He cries out in surprise, then looks down to see one of the rodent-things hunched over on the ground. It’s been shot already; black liquid is oozing out of a hole in its side. “Fuck,” he mutters, and shoots it again. Waste of bullets.

And then he notices the eyes, glowing like beacons in the gloom. All around him.

“Mom,” he says softly. He hears her breathe in, sharp.

He can hear her thinking. _We can’t kill them all_. He thought they _had_ killed them all, but the woods are teeming with beasts. The woods have been almost empty for weeks, where the fuck did they all come from?

His footsteps soundless, Will starts to back away from the creatures, the dead and the living. More and more of them come out from behind the trees to form perfectly ordered lines in the small clearing. They might as well be automatons.

The creatures watch them go, but they don’t move any closer. When Will and his mom are a few hundred yards away, a small soft sob escapes his throat. He doesn’t want to die the way the hybrid died. No one should die like that.

His mom takes his hand and holds on, but she doesn’t stop moving. He thinks of her fighting monsters, back when she was young. He tells himself she knows what she’s doing.

“They don’t want us,” she says, her voice pitched low. “Just go slow. Don’t attract their attention.”

“How do you know?”

“They can smell us.” Her lips are barely moving at all. “The hybrid smelled familiar. It’s from where they’re from, but they don’t know what we are. They’re not going to risk attacking us until they’re sure we’re not poisonous.”

“Are we?”

Her hand tightens on his. “Let’s not find out.”

The minutes it takes to get back to camp feel like hours. When they get back everyone’s gathered together watching for them.

Will’s mom doesn’t tell them anything. She just says, “We can’t wait till the morning. We need to get off the mountain _tonight_.”

Whatever is coming, this is where it starts. Up at the facility where they held him, in these mountains where they’ve been stealing people for decades. And there isn’t any time to waste.

Not if his mom is going to save the world.

Skinner tugs him to the side. “Are you ready?”

“No,” Will says. He looks back at everyone else. His mom. Payton. The other girl, her baby. “What do we tell them?”

“Nothing,” Skinner says. To himself, he adds, “Just like old times.”

He swallows. His mom is making quick work of the evacuation, even though everyone is weak and exhausted. Will pitches in, helping Sara wrap her baby high up on her back.

While he tugs the cloth into place, he sees his parents a little ways off. Too far away to eavesdrop the normal way, and his mom will know if he tries to eavesdrop creatively. She looks pissed, though.

He gets the baby set up and helps Joanne to her feet and hands Matt a backpack full of clean water, thinking the whole time what easy targets they’ll make. By the time he glances back, his parents are either kissing or whispering or both, their faces pressed together, speaking whatever secret language they’ve devised.

Somehow that makes him even sadder.

On her way out, Payton pauses next to him. “You’re not carrying anything,” she observes. “You’re not coming with us?”

Will shakes his head.

She bites her lip. “You’re not sick the way we are.” Payton’s dark skin has taken on a yellow cast; her eyes are sunken and dull.

“No,” he agrees. There’s no hiding it anymore.

“Like Sara’s baby,” she muses.

“Something like that.”

“But you’ll meet us there?” she asks. There’s a flash of her usual brightness, a spark. “When it’s all over?”

There’s a long pause. Probably too long, because Payton narrows her eyes and opens her mouth like she’s about to say something else.

“Yeah,” he says, cutting her off. What other answer can he give? “Of course.”

Payton hugs him. She’s only a few inches shorter than he is, but she tucks her head against his chest. Even though she’s shaking her hands hold him tight.

“Be brave,” she says into his ear, and he thinks how different that is from _stay safe._

“You too,” he whispers.

* * *

Just before they leave, Will flips to an empty page in his mother’s latest notebook. He doesn’t read any of the things she’s written; her words aren’t for him. She’ll have to make sense of it all later.

When he ran away the last time, he left a note that said, _I’ll be okay_. He can’t write that now. He’s pretty sure it isn’t true. He chews on the edge of the pen. He writes.

A minute later he jogs after Matt, who’s walking slowly at the back of the group. “Give this to my mom?” he says.

Matt nods and takes it. Will turns to go, back to his dad and Skinner and their backpack full of ammunition, back to the mountain and the mutants and the center of everything. His fight is here. It was always here.

“Hey,” his cousin calls after him. Will turns around. Matt says, “Go be Batman.”


	32. 28. scully & mulder

They walk through the first night, stopping whenever someone’s close to collapsing. Maybe this is a week’s walk for people who are rested and well fed and in good health, but in their current state it’ll take a month. On the first day they cover no more than ten miles, all downhill. At least the air down here is easier to breathe.

During the second night they rest in shifts. For three hours Scully sleeps fitfully, awakened over and over by a distant rumble she assumes is thunder. The sky roils through the night, the clouds twisting and sparking. Every once in a while lightning strikes, lighting up the forest bright as day, just for a split second.

The others shiver on the ground where they lie. Scully waits for rain that never comes.

Morning stretches hazy blue over the treetops, but it feels like the sun never really comes up. Sara and Payton eat half a granola bar each and throw it back up five minutes later. Scully grits her teeth and steps around it. There’s nothing to do but keep going.

A few hours later, the sky goes black.

All of them stop dead in their tracks to stare into the heavens, expecting another storm. There’s no lightning this time, but the noise is back: a pulsing roar, a sound like helicopters flying low overhead. She remembers the ice and the scream and the light.

Around them, in the sudden dark, the air fills with _something_ — it almost looks like pollen, floating down through the air. But Matt starts to cough, raw and deep, and Scully knows it’s something else.

There was a cave a little ways back. If any of them could run they could make it in minutes. They need shelter, something to protect them from whatever’s falling from the sky. “Back this way,” she yells, but as soon as she opens her mouth the spores find her, too.

Scully gasps, trying to breathe through the onslaught. She’s choking. It feels like the spores are expanding in her throat. She folds at the waist, convulsing, trying to force the invaders from her body. When she touches her face her hand comes away bloody.

She doesn’t see the rest of them go down, but she hears their bodies fall. The world is a dark haze. _Take cover_ , she thinks, but there is nowhere to run. There is nowhere else to go.

* * *

 

 

When the sky goes black, Mulder doesn’t even notice.

Since everyone else left they’ve been holed up inside an old hunting cabin, waiting for a reckoning, the doors shut and barricaded against anyone — or anything — that might want them. He’s been saying it for two years now: the waiting is the worst part.

Well, he hasn’t been saying it out loud. That seems like an invitation for the world to prove him wrong.

Last night the thunder was constant. Rain fell once, for just a few minutes. Toxic: it burned tiny holes in the roof that they’ve patched imperfectly and left scorch marks on the ground outside. The air is toxic too, he’s sure. None of them are eating anymore. Everything they swallow comes back up again.

Skinner’s asleep on the floor and Will is sitting with his back to the wall, eyes closed, long legs stretched out in front of him. The light coming in through the window is dim and tinged blue, and when it disappears entirely Mulder isn’t surprised. Probably another storm. Thunder rumbles off in the distance.

Will speaks from across the room. His voice sounds like an echo. “They’re here.”

Mulder narrows his eyes, questioning.

His son goes to stand in front of the window. The outline of his shadow is barely visible in the darkness. “Look.”

Without another word, Will leaves the cabin. Mulder follows him. In tandem they turn their faces upward, to where the sky used to be.

Over the past forty-six years Mulder has had this dream thousands of times, in a thousand different variations. The ship comes and returns his sister; the ship comes and takes him instead; the ship comes and destroys the world. The aliens are human or monstrous or liquid, neutral or desperate or aggressive. Every abductee he’s ever met described their ship differently; he’s cataloged them all. Years of sci-fi movies and a lifetime with an overactive imagination have primed Mulder for this moment.

Or they should have.

The world is dark as far as he can see, a night with no stars and no moon. The ship hovers a few hundred feet above the summit and blocks out the sun entirely. He could not have imagined that something could be so massive.

He hears a thin, metallic whine. Across the bottom of the ship, hundreds of tiny portals slide open, flashing bright colors in rhythm.

Mulder stares up into the blinking, impossible lights.

From the doorway to the cabin, Skinner’s voice: “The lights are a code. If the facility were still here, this is how they would communicate.”

It comes out as a growl, low in Mulder’s throat. “Communicate _what_?”

Will breathes the toxic air in deep, lets it out on a long exhale. “I have to go.”

“Will—”

“I can fix it. All of this, I.” Will trips over his words, knits his brow like he’s trying to figure out how to explain. “Dad, I — I’m getting stronger all the time. You can see it. You remember what I did, with your arm, with the soil, you _saw_ — you know what I can do.”

High above them, it starts to snow. At least that’s what it looks like: tiny white snowflakes floating down from the portals.

“Inside,” Will says. “ _Now_.”

“What is that stuff?” Mulder asks, watching through the open door. Will grabs the handle and yanks it closed.

“It’s going to kill everyone,” Will says. “Everyone who’s left. This is it.”

Will still has his hand on the door, like he’s about to rush out into the unknown. Mulder grabs him by the shoulder.

Will doesn’t shake him off. He looks at him long, then shrugs like it’s nothing.

And hasn’t Mulder always known this would happen eventually?

Upright with his shoulders back, Will is taller than Mulder now. Something catches in his throat. He’s lost so much time. He spent years seeing everyone else reflected in his son: Scully, Samantha, Matthew. Now, finally, it’s so easy to see himself: the stubborn set of his jaw, the flash of recklessness in his blue eyes. Mulder remembers being invincible, he remembers believing that he was the only one who could save the world. And maybe, some of those times, he was.

Maybe Will is.

His son says, “ _You told me_. You told me we can always fight.”

“This _isn’t what I meant_ ,” Mulder says, but he knows it’s done.

Will’s eyes flicker down. “I know. But it doesn’t change anything.”

“I’m going with him,” Skinner says. “If it’s any consolation.”

“I can go—”

“You can’t.” The older man’s voice is firm. “It had to be me or Scully.” He leaves the rest unsaid. Mulder wonders if he even told her. He wonders who Skinner is doing it for.

Will licks his lips, the same way Scully does when she’s nervous; he pushes his hair out of his eyes the way Mulder does. All of those familiar gestures, all the best parts of him and Scully. And all the things that are Will’s alone, the man he’s become, the battles he’s already fought. The sound of the bullet that killed the Smoking Man, a job Mulder never managed to finish. _I should have protected you_ , Mulder thinks.

Out loud, he just says, “Tell me what I can do.”

“When it’s over,” Will says, and then it takes a moment for him to get the rest of the words out. “When it’s over, come find me.”

There aren’t many things that have ever left Fox Mulder speechless.

Will turns to go, and the sight of his son turning to leave for — it can’t be the last time, he won’t let it be, but what if it is? — startles him into speech.

“Wait.” Mulder digs around in his pocket and pulls out the chain. The darkness is almost absolute, but the pendant still catches what light there is to catch.

Will takes it from him, holding its slight weight in his cupped palms. “Is that—”

“She stopped wearing it that winter,” he says. “I’ve been carrying it around since.”

“Why didn’t you give it back to her?”

“Because I’m selfish,” Mulder says flatly. “Look, I’ve spent my entire life searching for evidence of all the things I say I believe in. But your mom — there are things she _just believes_ , without ever asking for proof. Without ever needing it.”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

Mulder shakes his head. “You might. Later.”

Will fastens the necklace around his neck, tucking the cross under his T-shirt. He grabs Mulder in a quick, tight hug, and for one fleeting moment it feels like Will is twelve years old again, waking up from the throes of a nightmare and looking for comfort.

But this — this is Mulder’s nightmare, and there’s no waking up.

Will doesn’t say goodbye. Skinner follows him into the dark.

And Mulder stands by the window, waiting for the proof he always said he wanted.


	33. Chapter 33

When he and Sharon were young, they used to dream about what they’d do when he retired. With a comfortable pension and a low mandatory retirement age, Walter expected at least a decade or two of traveling the world, fishing all summer, finally catching up with all the nieces and nephews whose birthdays he’d forgotten every year.

Once he’d ended up embroiled with the Syndicate, it became obvious that none of his retirement dreams would come to pass. But he could never tell Sharon, so it remained a low hum, the background noise of their relationship. _You still work too much_ , she’d say. _When you retire, we’ll have to find you a hobby. Maybe you can write a book._ They’d get a postcard from her sister, from Paris or Vancouver or the Grand Canyon: _When you retire_ , she’d say. _We’ll send them so many postcards they can make wallpaper out of ‘em._

He considers it a blessing that she passed before the end came. He was with her when she died, he knows where her body rests.

Sometimes he dreams of her. He doesn’t know if he believes in an afterlife, but the last time he died, someone was waiting for him on the other side.

Soon.

For now he follows Fox Mulder’s son through the dark, covering his nose and mouth with a rag from a dead man’s cabin. His breathing is shallow, but he knows the poison is still inside him.

The climb to the summit isn’t particularly steep, but he isn’t in particularly good condition. Every time he looks in Will’s direction, the kid has his brow furrowed in concentration, which makes Walter suspect he’s getting some additional assistance. Whenever he flags, he gets a sudden burst of energy, and he can’t think of a likelier cause.

“I’m sure Spender told them you were dead,” he says to Will, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Cocky fucker.”

Will gives him a curious glance. He looks just like his mom, sharp and serious. “That’s his name? The smoking guy?”

The question makes Walter wonder exactly what Mulder and Scully told their son. Not that it’s any of his business. “Yes,” he says shortly.

Will closes his eyes and inhales, and for a split second it’s like a haze lifts. The air clears and Walter can breathe; if they were above the treeline he’s sure he could see for miles. For a moment, even the colors of the leaves seem brighter. Walter starts to believe that this kid can actually save the world. As the colors fade again, Will turns to him. “He said that I…that I was created for this. To be a tool. To be a weapon.”

Walter knows that feeling well. He was Will’s age when he enlisted, when he learned to kill and forgot why he’d ever wanted to. When he became a weapon. It took him a long time to learn to be human again.

But Will — no matter what’s in his blood, the kid is human to the core.

"He was right about a lot of things,” Will says softly.

Skinner says, “He was wrong about a lot of things, too.”

* * *

There is a gaping maw in what must be the center of the ship and Will and Skinner stand beneath it, staring up. Even from the top of the mountain the ship is massive beyond belief, covering the sky as far as they can see. More portals open, bigger ones, emitting a faint light.

From one, a beam emerges. He’s seen this before, out on the ice. Last time it was taking people away, not sending new ones down.

Skinner says, “Can you get me up there?”

Will tears his gaze from the ship and turns to stare at him. “Um. How?”

“The air is changing, just like everything else,” the older man reasons. “Can you manipulate it?”

It takes him a second to realize what Skinner’s asking. Then: “Are you seriously asking me if I can make you _fly_?”

Skinner just looks at him expectantly.

With a sigh, Will closes his eyes. He _reaches_ for the spores, trying to coerce them into gathering and lifting Skinner up. A bunch of them pop and self-destruct when he touches them — _now_ that’s _interesting_ — but otherwise, nothing happens.

“Yeah, no,” Will says. “What’s your backup plan?”

“I didn’t have one.”

“That’s not reassuring.” Will bites his lip and looks at the beam. It stretches all the way from the ship to the ground, where it forms a perfect circle of white light. “Can you go up with them?”

Skinner eyes it too. “I don’t think those are bidirectional.”

“Then we just have to convince them to turn around. Shouldn’t be a problem.” There’s a lot more confidence in his voice than in his heart, but that’s true a lot of the time. Something he learned from his dad. Fake it to make it. As long as he keeps talking he won’t have to think about how fucking terrified he is.

He glances doubtfully at the handgun in Skinner’s pocket. “What’ll you do once you’re up there? You’re gonna need a bigger gun.”

Skinner points to his bag. “Do you know what an IED is, son?”

“Don’t call me _son_.” Will tries to make a gesture that encompasses the whole of the ship, but there’s nothing doing. “I know that no IED is going to destroy a ship the size of Virginia.”

“We don’t need to destroy the whole thing. I’ve seen the schematics. If I can destroy the command center, it’ll be enough.”

This sounds stupid to Will, but an iceberg sank the Titanic and bullet holes used to bring down airplanes. Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star with one shot. _Fiction_ , he reminds himself, but reality is at least as weird. He can picture it: an explosion in the control room, the fire spreading, the life support systems failing. The ship a black carcass hanging overhead, maybe forever.

“Is this the only one?” he asks. “The only ship?”

Skinner nods. “There aren’t many of them left. Their planet was destroyed decades ago. They’ve been waiting a long time.”

For a moment he wavers. It’s easy enough to think of a dead ship, and something else to think of all the lives within it. The creatures inside, suffocating and dying. Just like everybody on Earth. He says, “So you’re telling me that we’re about to commit genocide.”

Skinner shrugs noncommittally.

A second later, Will does too. “They should’ve picked a different planet,” he says grimly.

* * *

And that’s when they see the bodies emerging from the ship, feet-first into the light.

“Game on,” Will says. His face is emotionless.

“I’m sorry it has to end like this,” Walter says, and he is. There isn’t much in his life he regrets, but his part in all of this, he does.

Will’s expression doesn’t change at all. “There are worse endings.” Then he closes his eyes, and Walter knows it’s a dismissal.

Walter moves toward the light. All the hours he spent holed up in the subbasements of the tower, poring over schematics, assembling and re-assembling bombs. He knows that they’re not expecting any resistance — that everyone is already supposed to be dead. Still, he’ll only have seconds to activate the device once he’s on board. Time was he could assemble an M-16 in thirty seconds, but he never had much use for explosives.

Until now. And he only has one chance to get it right.

In the beam the creatures are unmoving. None of them are facing him. That’s better, he thinks. Not to see your death coming.

He sees his, and he’s ready.

One of the creatures screams, and in an instant the beam reverses. He steps into the light.

From inside the beam, Walter can see the whole world.

* * *

Will watches the bodies float to earth, strange and almost beautiful. In the distance they could be flowers carried on the wind.

He is going to destroy them all.

Skinner stands at the edge of the beam, waiting for its direction to reverse. Waiting for the aliens to see that Earth isn’t dead after all. That they’re alive. That they’re fighting.

He breathes in the spores and they only make him stronger. He slices his palm and watches his blood drop to the ground, red, red, red.

The antibodies. The cure. That night on the ice, when they almost took him.

Almost.

The man — Spender — his grandfather? does it even matter? — who planned all of this, who collaborated, who acquiesced. And Will’s the one who has to pay for it.

Will’s blood starts to work its strange impossible magic in the soil. Black liquid bubbles up from the ground beneath his feet. The strangled roots and seeds are uncurling, remembering how to breathe. He can give them air.

Even with his eyes closed he knows when the spores start to implode, just like before. One by one they pop out of existence. For a long time now Will has known that he can move things and draw them out, but’s something else entirely to destroy. His head is dizzy with it. _Is this why_ , he thinks. All the men in all of history who choked on their own power, so thirsty for destruction that they drowned in all the blood.

In the back of his mind, it occurs to him that destroying everything the aliens left behind might destroy him, too. He doesn’t let himself think about that for long.

The first alien drops to the earth, landing lightly on its feet. Will doesn’t let himself really _see_ it: not its skin, gray as a corpse; not its slim, sturdy body; not its eyes, the same liquid black that Will’s been coaxing out of the earth.

The creature looks at him. Its eyes are strange. _Gentle_ , he thinks, unbidden. Will turns his face away.

Once he overheard his parents arguing about it: about whether or not humanity deserved to be saved. Will read his dad’s philosophy textbooks cover to cover and he never found an answer, but he knows they didn’t deserve to die like this. His grandma, his aunts and uncles, his friends. His entire future.

The creature’s mouth opens. It inhales.

But whatever the air is supposed to be, it isn’t. Not anymore.

The creature screams, and then it chokes. Around it others start to land, too, and they start to convulse, their bodies falling inert to the ground. Just like he’d hoped, the beams reverse, pulling their fallen back up into the ship.

Skinner is carried up with them, and Will would think _good luck_ , but he knows that you can only ever make your own.

* * *

Matt’s mostly just pissed that this is how he dies. Lying face-down in the mud, covering his face with the bottom of his T-shirt. He’s gonna die alone and afraid in the dark, and fuck a universe that let him walk a thousand miles just to end up dying in the middle of nowhere.

His arms are an impossible weight. He remembers going to the beach when he was a kid and seeing a turtle on its back a few feet from the water’s edge. Rebecca had turned it over gently, and they’d watched it scurry back into the ocean. At the time he thought it must’ve been a pretty stupid turtle, to end up like that. Now he’s chock-full of sympathy.

Matt grows and wills his limbs to move. He manages to pull one knee up and plants it firmly on the ground. Then an arm. With every last bit of strength in him, he pushes off his hand and knee — and falls all the way over onto his back.

He lies there panting with exertion, furious that all he managed to do was roll over.

And then he realizes that he’s breathing. That the air is air again, that those weird pollen things are gone.

Around him the others are still coughing, which means they’re still breathing, too. He wants to tell them to turn over, to breathe the clean air, but he can’t quite form the words.

The ship is still up there. He can’t really turn his head, so it fills his vision. Everything about this is impossible, but somehow this seems like the most impossible thing of all: there are bodies floating in midair, suspended in beams of light. It looks like fucking _Star Trek_. They’re not human — clearly — but they’re not so far off from the hybrids they’ve found in the woods. Especially since those hybrids were all dead, and these guys look pretty dead too: their mouths hanging open, bodies contorted in positions that no human could manage.

Matt is breathing. The aliens — or whatever they are — aren’t.

_Will_ , he thinks.

He watches the bodies disappear into the bowels of the ship. The coughing around him subsides. “Look,” he breathes. No one moves.

Above him, sudden: a burst of light. A sound that fills the world.

And everything goes dark.

* * *

It’s easier than he would have thought: saving the world, ending someone else’s. Easier than assembling an M-16. Easier to save the world than live in it.

There is a burst of light.

* * *

Once, a long time ago, Will had a nightmare that was a dream that was a prophecy.

Over the years he’d convinced himself that it was the result of too many nights staying up late reading about Frodo and Harry Potter and Meg Murry, too many afternoons daydreaming about how he would be the one to save the world and fix everything. That’s all: just the brain working the way it’s supposed to. Filing things away, adding things up.

Now, of course, he understands.

He kicks off his sneakers to plant his feet in the toxic soil. It’s too warm — almost hot — and he can feel things crawling around between his toes, and they are not the things that are supposed to be there. The black liquid squeezes out. It covers his feet, his ankles. He thinks of the plants in the greenhouse, watching them grow; the soil fed them, and when they died, they fed the soil. He is taking root. He is restoring balance.

Will closes his eyes.

Somewhere there are his mom and dad, and he’s sorry for that, for leaving them. He remembers the note he left for his parents last time: _I love you. I’m sorry._ He loves them. He isn’t sorry. A long time ago Will had a prophecy, and whatever he’s told himself in the intervening years, he’s always known what is true.

Will _reaches_. He lets himself go out through his feet into the soil, out through his hands into the air. He doesn’t even have to bleed, not anymore. Whatever changed the land has also made Will terribly, irreversibly powerful.

He can feel himself leaving. There’s too much of him now that isn’t human. It feels like he’s disintegrating. It doesn’t hurt.

He is everywhere, he is everything all at once.

There is a burst of light.


	34. Chapter 34

When he gets to the plateau at the summit, there is nothing left but dirt and ash and blackened, jagged shards of metal. Every tree and shrub and blade of grass has been leveled. Below him the mountainside is charred from the flames that rained down after the explosion. The late afternoon sky is dark and tinged red.

Mulder makes his way gingerly through the debris, stepping around anything that looks too sharp or like it might still be on fire. He has no interest in losing another limb, to an alien virus or tetanus or anything else.

The destruction is absolute. He has no idea what he’s hoping to find, what the best case scenario is.

But he’s breathing easier now.

In the near distance, he sees something on the ground. It’s the biggest thing left on the mountaintop.

It’s shaped an awful lot like his son.

Mulder exhales, then jogs over to where he lies. “Will,” he says, even though it seems impossible that he’ll get a response. “ _Will_.”

He starts pulling scrap and shrapnel from his son’s body, brushes the dirt from his forehead. His eyes are closed, his skin is pale, bloodless. “Will,” he says again, his voice breaking. He’s forgotten how to say anything else.

At his side, Will’s hands are still clenched tight. Gently, Mulder uncurls his fingers. His hands are dark with dried blood; there are cuts on Will’s palms.

Cuts that are healing.

For a moment he forgets how to breathe. And then he rests his fingers against Will’s neck: feeling for the pulse there. Finding it.


	35. after

On the island the sun rises unclouded in the mornings. Usually she watches it from inside, a blanket around her shoulders. She is always cold.

In the corner William sleeps and stays sleeping, his brow untroubled. One day he’ll wake up. They believe that. They have to.

* * *

She still tracks the radio stations at night. She is making a map of the known world. Every few weeks they send envoys out to find survivors who got lost in the aftermath. There are trade routes, there are travelers.

Most nights, Mulder broadcasts from the island. She picks him up on her radio when he does. Frohike’s tapping and footsteps fill the background while Mulder talks about the weather. Sometimes, after he goes off the air, she hears Matthew’s voice cutting through the static. He rambles on, about things he saw or people he misses. Scully wonders who he’s talking to, but doesn’t ask.

The seasons change, and for the first time in two years they progress in an almost-normal fashion. Summer fades into fall, fall sinks into a long, mild winter. The ground freezes but it only snows three times. By the third time, in February, the snow melts clean on her test strips. Scully drinks a handful. She remembers doing this decades ago, with her dead brothers, her dead sister. It tastes as good and as pure now as it ever did.

* * *

It’s months before Scully can finally look back in the notebook she’d had at the time. She’s started and filled three more since then.

When she flips through it at last, the pages feel brittle, the edges sharp against her callused fingertips. Pages and pages of her own handwriting, yet it looks strange, unfamiliar. Tucked between two pages she finds the tarot card the psychic had given her: _The Star_. _There’s hope_ , the woman had told her. _Don’t give up_.

On one of the last pages, the handwriting is Will’s. She never knew. She still doesn’t know when he wrote the message, or why.

He wrote: _I was never yours_. He crossed it out. He wrote: _I was always yours_. He wrote: _All of this is part of the plan_. He wrote: _Everything will be okay_.

* * *

A little boat bobs in the protected waters of the harbor. A man sits in it alone. He is there nearly every afternoon, and Scully has taken to watching him.

She is standing at the edge of the water doing just that when Mulder comes up next to her.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks.

She imagines the man finding the abandoned boat, spending the winter re-caulking the bottom, pulling it out into the harbor for the first time and feeling like he invented the world. They are constantly beginning. Everything is always new.

“What if this is all there is?” she asks. The boat strains against the rope that ties it to the makeshift dock. “What if it’s just this?”

Mulder, who used to stare out at the entire universe and find it wanting, takes her hand. He says, “Then it’s enough,” and she almost believes him.

* * *

When the ground thaws she holds the soil between her fingers and smells it, breathing in deep. Dust to dust; everything is ashes but here, here is salvation. When it rains, the rain is water. When the storms come she can hear the earth sigh.

The world remade, with so many fewer people in it, and so few of them hers.

Matthew and Mulder collect samples and carry them inside. She completes the tests she can. There is soil that will grow plants that will nourish them, water they can drink as it falls from the clouds. The world, remade.

There is something almost like a celebration that night: there is a fire that burns clean, there are people who sit shoulder to shoulder around it.

* * *

In the morning Mulder shades his eyes and stares directly into the sun, just like he always has. “Now what?” he asks.

Scully looks out toward the water, feels the dirt beneath her toes. “Now we plant.”


	36. after

Will sleeps, and he dreams of the world to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't thank you all enough for sticking with me through this. It's only been, uh…nine months? Isn't that how long it takes to gestate an actual human child? (Unless you're Scully.)
> 
> Just a few quick endnotes:
> 
> • I just want to send you over to [@fistful-of-fandom's gorgeous art](https://fistful-of-fandom.tumblr.com/post/162207482652/fic-aesthetics-then-the-bomb-ive-said-it-before) one more time, because it's so much better than this deserves and I looked at it a billion times while working on this second part. 
> 
> • If you're interested in the playlist I've been listening to for, again, nine months, it's [up on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/goodbyewaffles/playlist/55bon3x6U7gzNlRDKzZ7wu) for your listening pleasure. I am sure that I stole lyrics wholesale from these songs.
> 
> • A few people have asked about this AU. For what it's worth, in my own head, this is set in the same universe as [Say Yes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7324309) and [the fourth chapter of The Son You Always Had](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8143144/chapters/18772205) — so, some version of the story where Mulder doesn't die or have a secret terminal illness (or go to jail or whatever the hell happened in those seasons, who even knows) and Scully doesn't give Will away. A conversation from TSYAH is referenced a couple of times, if obliquely.
> 
> This is it, guys. Thanks again.


End file.
